Traffic "Bait" and Ad Clicks: Perfect Market’s Study Isn’t Telling the Whole Story
Posted by randfish
Yesterday, Perfect Market, a company that "helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk1" released a study that’s been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analyzes the relative traffic value per visit of several types of content, coming to the conclusion2 that "while the Lindsay Lohan sentencing and other celebrity coverage drove significant online traffic for major news publishers, articles about unemployment benefits, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates and other serious topics were the top-earning news topics based on advertising revenue per page view."
Coverage included the New York Times’ Traffic Bait Doesn’t Bring Ad Clicks, Columbia Journalism Review’s Celebs are Loud, but Hard News Pays, Nieman Journalism Lab’s Public Interest News Can Be More Valuable to Publishers than Traffic Bait and Search Engine Land’s Hard News Pays More than Chasing Search Trends.
I’m worried for a few reasons:
- What’s the branding value of those stories? Do they drive up awareness of the publications that authored them? Do they increase return visits?
- What other actions do those visitors take? Are they more likely to subscribe to an RSS
October 19, 2010
Tags: "Bait", Clicks, Isn't, Market's, Perfect, Story, Study, Telling, Traffic, Whole
Posted in: SEO / Traffic / Marketing
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