Monday, 18 June 2007
It suddenly occurred to me that there might be a better way of verifying my impression that afr.com would have lost readers as a result of its move from an html-based subscription model to the awful Flash-based one I wrote about recently. (Others seem to have similar opinions – see eg this well-written post at ExplodedLibrary bunker.)
Enter Alexa, a site for measuring web traffic. Now it’s not perfect, but any systematic under/over counts or reporting biases should remain relatively constant over time — meaning that somewhat meaningful comparisons can be drawn against its own figures from different time periods, even if they cannot necessarily be drawn against data from other statistics sites.
Without further ado, here is the 5 year graph of traffic to afr.com as measured by Alexa. That crater in mid-2006 corresponds, unsurprisingly enough, with the introduction of AFR Access.
A comparison against other Australian and international news sites is also instructive.
Here is AFR up against smh.com.au and theaustralian.news.com.au over the last three years. The Fin is effectively hidden in the statistical noise — or, as one of my superb former lecturers used to say when teaching us about NMR spectroscopy , “It’s lost in the grass”:
And, to prove my hunch, here’s the 6 month performance of afr.com — showing no pickup since the “change” from AFR Access to afr.com on 2 April 2007:
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2 Responses to “More on afr.com – a quick traffic analysis”
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June 28th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
As someone was directly involved in the ‘afr.com fiasco’, I have to tell you that you’re missing the point.
The fact is that Glenn Burge, the afr’s editor, WANTED the website to fail, because he sees the web as a threat to print circulation.
Hence, the project was nobbled from the start.
June 29th, 2007 at 7:26 am
Ben, sorry to contradict you but you have made a bit of a stuff up here, although in fairness you allude to the problem with Alexa yourself.
Firstly, the decline in afr.com pages coincides with the launch of afraccess. You have tracked the wrong site so what you are really seeing is the migration of traffic from one site to the other. Secondly and more importantly, alexa can not track afraccess (which in April this year effectively replaced AFR.com) because it can’t track flex. So if you track afraccess on Alexa all its measures its the home page. It doesn’t measure the page impressions inside the application where most of the activity is generated. In fact if you go to the alexa link you mention, click on the link to afr.com on Alexa and look at the AFR.com thumbnail you will see the evidence for yourself.
Finally if you’re so concerned about what’s been happening to traffic its very easy to find out. afr.com (afraccess) is tracked by Nielsens, which all of us in advertising land have access to. Its traffic has been growing very strongly and consistently now for 6 months.