Pageviews and uniques are not the favored digital metrics they used to be, but as they fell roughly 20% earlier this year at local newspaper sites, the decline sent a chill through the industry.In a year of soft advertising and rising newsprint and delivery costs, reduced traffic creates an unwelcome added challenge. Programmed ad placements are still sold by total impressions, so less traffic translates to less revenue. A traffic decline also reduces the number of prospective customers who can be started on the path to paid digital subscriptions.Matt Lindsay, whose Mather Economics is a leading consultancy on strategy for building digital revenue, told me the situation is not quite as dire as it may look. “The fact that pageviews are down is not a bad thing,” he emailed, “if the long-term value of their users … is going up. We did some math a while back and the breakeven point was about 4:1 — that is, you can lose four anonymous low-value users if you get one high-value known user.”Lindsay also did not think that tightening paywalls were the culprit for the plunge. “For most publishers, premium content is less than 25% of all articles and paywall rules are only impacting maybe 11% of users. These factors have some effect … but they are likely not a major reason for lower pageviews. The news cycle is the No. 1 reason.”
Origen: Traffic to local news websites has plummeted. What happens now? – Poynter
