Boffo Traffic For DMN’s Site
A curious FrontBurnervian points at this Editor & Publisher report about the increase in site visitors at the country’s largest newspapee sites. True enough, the DMN’s numbers stand out:
The Dallas Morning News’ monthly uniques surged 88% in April, compared to the same month a year ago.
I wonder what their secret is/was. The curious FrontBurnervian has tongue-in-cheek theory:
What in the world are these guys doing to drive this kind of traffic? Or, do they have some cool new tracking device that their former circulation folks invented to inflate their traffic?
13 Comments to “Boffo Traffic For DMN’s Site”
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The reported survey data is from Nielsen Net Ratings. I hope it’s better than their old TV survey methodology.
The Frontburnervian’s tounge-in-cheek theory may apply to DMN’s internal traffic data because they allow any ‘bot (i.e. automated searches from search engines, etc) to hit their server. http://www.dallasnews.com/robots.txt.
Compare this to the smart folks at the Star -Telegram: http://www.star-telegram.com/robots.txt.
Oh, oh, D Mag. I hope you are filtering ‘bots: http://www.dmagazine.com/robots.txt. You don’t want your sales people to distribute “enthusiastic” data.
This is from the “World’s Tallest Midget” category.
DMN site traffic increased 88% … with a grand total of 2,468 unique visitors. NYTimes.com was up 30% with 17,911 unique visitors.
Which is the better percentage.
And that number of DMN.com unique visitors _ 2, 4, 6, 8, who do we appreciate?
Yo Guilty, those numbers are in thousands. So it’s 2,468,000 and 17,911,000.
The midget just had a growth spurt…
DMN.com might be worthwhile it is was useable. They need a serious look at the architecture of that site. Plus register-walls suck. When I am prompted to sign or register I leave. Speaking of site design, is LFT the only advertiser on this site, or am I just getting some seriously bad behavior targeting? Hint, I’m a dude.
more note…Neilsen is similar to the way TV ratings are done. No one knows someones true site traffic unless they are the owner of that site. Sites like quantcast.com, alexa.com and compete.com try to come up with their own models.
enough nerd talk
—>>>> That’s not a dude?
Anyone who knows how to steal millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenue from skewed newspaper circultion numbers (remember they paid 26 million in cash for getting caught, so you could imagine what the real dollar amount was…. kind of like cockroaches behind the wall)can certainly find a way to lie and steal about the internet hits.
It’s all lies, damn lies and statistics when it comes to public reporting on web traffic. Same day this came out, Borrell Associates released a study with Media Audit data pegging the DMN’s monthly online audience at only 734k (as of December)– which even with the growth story in the E&P numbers is only a fraction of the Nielsen numbers. They also peg NBC5i.com as having a bigger audience than the DMN, which many other sources contradict.
http://www.borrellassociates.c.....prodID=111
Unless/until there’s a single standard, these sorts of numbers can only be so useful — unfortunately for those in the business, there aren’t many ways of comparing apples.
It was bound to increase at least some amount because nearly every post on Frontburner contains a link to one of their stories.
Generally, the number of unique visitors is calculated (actually, it’s estimated) by combining Web server requests from a single IP address. It’s not 100% accurate because multiple users can share the same IP address within the report period. Thus, all the internal DMN people are likely driving up numbers each month because we have no idea what IBM (their outsourcer) is doing to “estimate” this number as “uniques” vs. same visitor. The same can be said for any other corporate, fixed IP site (with multiple internal users) that hits them. For example, they could say “D Mag Group has 30 internal users, times 1000 hits a month from D-fixed-IP = 30,000 uniques from D a month. Ditto for Mary Kay or Brinker or ???. No way to know what they do there.
Additionally, monthly uniques generally go down over the course of the month, since each person is only counted once in a given month. But, if they changed in the past year, to measuring uniques by the day or week, then adding them all together to get a month’s worth, that would also skew the numbers way up.
Suffice to say, it all boils down to BFD.
I’ll bet they’re counting the clicks to X out pop ups as “visits”. They get six for one that way.
I just discovered today that they are now charging 75 cents for the DMN. They must be the American Airlines of newspapers, just a spot above or below USA TODAY on the journalism food chain.
Bill, NO, wrong. Your counting methodology is so 1999 (hence your name?) and your assumptions are off base. Requests (or “hits”) as a counting methodology went the way of the DoDo bird when cookies proliferated. DMN drops cookies on each unique visitor and IBM (or any outsourcer) can identify U.V.s from a single I.P.
Although daily uniques go down from day to day throughout a month, no advertiser cares about that. Duh. And no, I’m not going to waste my time going into marketing 101 and explain the importance of more important metrics.
DMN people driving up numbers you sau? Uh, and how many employees do they have? I can see it now. Mong: “Hey, Blow. I need you and Ragland to bang the Web site like a bunch of lab rats for the rest of the month.” Wrong.
You’re either a hosting dork or an old marketing hack, and you don’t know what you are talking about.
I thought (or at least read somewhere) that as neat as the number of unique visitors may be to a site, even more important is how long the UVs stick around.
Anyone seen any data on how long visitors stick around at dallasnews.com?