In what can only be seen as great news amongst all the doom and gloom for newspapers recently, it seems like newspapers are having the opposite problem to the one we expected: they are getting way too much traffic. So much traffic in fact, that many newspapers are calling out and asking for help from search engines and news aggregators. Organizations such as News Corp and the Associated Press are asking for search engines to stop indexing their content so as not to send them any more free traffic. The ones that are especially inundated by traffic (i.e WSJ) are also asking news aggregators to stop linking to them and imploring them to reduce the traffic sent. By not linking, newspapers can also ensure that their Google PageRanks don’t get any higher since the consequences are severe: even more traffic than they can handle.
In a surprising move, even the Guardian Media Group, an organization that normally enjoys and appreciates incoming traffic is asking for the government to review the role of news aggregators like Google News.
I thought I’d take a few minutes to guage the severity of the “traffic abundance” problem and see how Google and other news aggregators can come to the newspaper’s rescue. With some help from Robin Goad at the Hitwise Blog, I was able to get some statistics to shed some more light here. Although this data is based on UK data, I’m fairly sure it is representative of the wider world as well (in either case, let’s assume some margin of error).
According to the statistics, newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them traffic. If they ask Facebook and Yahoo to stop linking, they can reduce by a further 4.69%. If they really want to reduce traffic even further, they can shut down all news aggregators and that should comfortably reduce their traffic by around 40%. That will leave them with 60% of the current traffic, which I imagine should satisfy their current needs.
Jeff Jarvis, who knows a thing or two about the news business says “Google is far and away the most productive means of sending audience to news sites.” (OK, so he said that two years ago, but he’s ahead of the pack). As such, it is no surprise that newspapers are turning to Google immediately to help solve their current traffic overload problems.
Finally, Jay Rosen also has a great post about this exact same issue, also from two years ago. It seems like these traffic spurts come in cycles, and we’re in the middle of a veritable plague of traffic and readers. The only way to escape this plague is to shut down the aggregators, turn off Google, turn away atleast 40% of your readers and wait for it to pass.
In my experience, that number is much higher. A site with proper SEO will get much higher Google refer percentages. I worked on a community newspaper site with strong community engagement and the number was almost 60%.
Importantly, the other 40% wouldn’t have been so numerous either unless we’d taken those steps to dominate our community on every search term. For news sites, proper SEO isn’t about maximizing traffic, it’s about maximizing your community.
Implementing a proper SEO and community-building strategy drove our traffic up by 60 times.
I realize you’re being ironic here, but I think the real numbers make it even more ironic.
What’s fascinating to me is the cognitive gulf between people who get the web and people who don’t. I know printies understand numbers. It’s got to be psychological.
Hi Tim – I couldn’t agree more. The numbers I put out were very conservative, only because those were based on the only ‘real’ stats that I could get my hands on. Statistics from insiders like yourself only highlight the importance of search and organic traffic to newspapers.
BTW, the link between SEO and maximizing community is an interesting one – it comes down to providing relevant content, and specifically relevant *local* content. By ensuring your newspaper has proper SEO techniques in place, it’s simply opening up your existing relevant, local content (and the brand) to the community. Such a simple, yet powerful idea.
[...] getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided [...]
[...] getting your wish and that Google will no longer link to you. Beware what you wish for. You’d lose a third of your traffic overnight. If other aggregators (I work with one) and bloggers (I am one) and Facebook all decided [...]
What an excellent blog, I’ve added your feed to my RSS reader.
Ideal watch that fit to fast-pace life–Chopard
[...] Thanks for the quick response — I don’t want to generalize just from the Missourian’s data, so I really do want to know what other newspapers are experiencing. Also, the blog post is fantastic. The title says it all: Newspaper websites can reduce their traffic by 32.08% by simply asking Google to stop sending them t… [...]