Judging newspaper website success

From Chris Jennewein on March 7, 2007 at 9:22 AM

For a business perspective, a successful Web site must have significant penetration within its target audience, show growing traffic and turn a profit. Business and journalism goals typically overlap but are not the same. A prize-winning online package may not generate a lot of traffic in the near term. Nevertheless, encouraging such work is crucial to a site's long-term growth. So I'd like to see both great journalism and a successful business.

From Robert Niles on March 7, 2007 at 11:25 AM

As with any business venture, the benchmarks for success are whatever the owners say they are. ;-)

I'm being a little sarcastic, but there is an important point to be remembered here. Too often, website managers have one set of benchmarks -- which they think they have met -- only to see the owners, with a different set of benchmarks that the managers didn't know about, swoop in one day and start canning people. You've got to work with ownership to establish well-defined benchmarks that everyone recognizes that everyone's agreed upon.

Now, in establishing those benchmarks, I'd argue for economically sustainable readership growth as well as a track record of introducing new innovations to the market. By economically sustainable readership growth, I mean that the average of monthly unique visitors to the site is growing, year over year, and that the site is either profitable, or losing money at an acceptible rate that can be funded by profit elsewhere in the organization. If you are seeking print-level profit margins on the Web, you're killing your ability, at this point, to fulfill the second criterion.

Which is innovation. This is a "what have you done for me lately" medium with close to zero barriers to entry. Your publication needs to establish a culture that supports innovation, including both new content features and new reader interactivity on your site. This is a foreign concept in most news organizations, which have been reporting and producing papers the same way for decades. But it is an essential benchmark for a website's long-term survival. And it is more important to establish this culture than to milk as much cash of the Web as you can this fiscal year.

That's my $.02.

From Anthony Moor on March 7, 2007 at 2:55 PM

We are concerned about being an indispensable local resource, so we look at our local reach and local frequency. Still, overall page views and unique visitors continue to be important to advertisers, so that's a metric we track as well.

But because we are journalists, we also do things just because it's the right thing to do, not because we think they're going to blow out the numbers. Many of our blogs are speaking to a particular niche audience. Some of our channels have no interest to advertisers. And we're mindful of the need to innovate, so we don't require instant success from a metrics standpoint of any initiative.