TheWayoftheWeb - Latest Comments in Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

John Duncan — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:49:40 -0000

Thanks Dan for a fair critique of my original piece.

You are absolutely right about its flaws and I would also agree that the debate has moved on now. My interest in it came from a time when there was a question of allocation of resources for innovation and I was cautioning about sending all our smartest brightest people to work on websites whose audience was relatively small compared to the newspaper but seemed larger. We were feeding a sense that the internet had arrived as the future of newspapers becaiuse it was so huge and I was trying to force a valid comparative audience number from the oranges and apples that existed.

I also was cautioning against thinking that online revenue was going to pay for itself any time soon. That point has turned out to still be true and relevant two years later, which I'm very sad about.

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

neilperkin — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:33:35 -0000

Totally agree with you Dan. It's apples and oranges. Apart from being based on some pretty major assumptions, it's not legitimate to compare across different methodologies like this. Everyone is interested in more data on cross-media readership but I don't think this is the way to do it. I believe the NRS are making moves in this area to provide some solid data for print publisher web properties so hopefully that will help

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

Dan Thornton — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:17:40 -0000

@Doug,

I totally agree (see the section of the post talking about the elephant in the room) - it's not a case of newspapers splitting readerships between print and online - it's a case of that readership scattering to the digital (Computer and mobile) four winds to find whatever is the most appropriate way for them to keep up with life as individuals...

One of my favourite examples is the somewhat niche use of Greasmonkey as a plugin for Firefox to do all kinds of things to websites that the site owner is unlikely to ever know about (My post on it is called 'evidence of end user control')

Part of my current role is attempting to coordinate all the relevant channels and platforms from a marketing perspective...which is a fun challenge!

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

Andrew — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 09:06:05 -0000

some great points dan. classic case of garbage in, garbage out...

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

Doug Robinson — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:42:02 -0000

Your article, and Martin Langeveld's are interesting reads, but I cannot help but think you are both missing several "online" methods of reading the News. RSS feeds, news aggregators, and Cell phone applications are also alternatives to physically reading a newspaper. I think, and this is with limited experience working for a paper in IT working with web and media specialists, that the paper's websites are just one factor of the electronic delivery. While still relatively in it's infancy, these methods are under the radar for reporting and scope. Not saying you are wrong, but these are factors that definitely influence how people get news without the paper.

Enjoyed the article, thanks.

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

Dan Thornton — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:29:06 -0000

Cheers Dave, and totally agree that's another point to include!

Re: Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats

david cushman — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:27:14 -0000

what the print figures never grasp are huge great lumpy valuable things such as: conversations generated, relationships fostered, content created, groups formed, action enabled and er... value created

Take a look at the content on the guardian's site, for example. For each item of 'printed' news, there may be 10 items of UGC created.

If you only calculate value in readership terms you're missing 90% of the value.