USA Today’s performance
Was just reading Arrington’s post on the lack of success of USA Today’s social networking relaunch. If you’ll remember from months ago when USA Today launched their social networking bloggers around the sphere were not impressed, outraged was more like it. I, as is my way, was extremely annoyed at said bloggers. Arrington’s post, on the other hand is pretty even handed but I still think is coming to a conclusion based on limited information.
That is, he’s looking at data from Compete.com and comparing the traffic going to USA Today to nytimes.com and washingtonpost.com. Given the downward trend of USA Today and the pretty flat line of the other two he concludes that the social networking was a failure and that perhaps news and social networking don’t mix. All completely reasonable and potentially true.
My problem stems, though, from his data set on a couple levels. First Compete just isn’t an accurate measure. Just like Alexa, it suffers from all sorts of bias problems. That’s one big problem - who knows how close to accurate those numbers are, they could be anywhere from dead on to really, really wrong. But let’s assume for now that they more or less reflect the trend.
The other, bigger problem is that there is the underlying assumption that the only factor in this is the social networking features. That is, since the trend is downward and they added social networking features, they must simply not be working since those features should be increasing page views. There are a lot of factors that are involved in a site’s traffic, content, competition, audience seasonality, promotional efforts, and the list goes on and on. To come to the conclusion that news and social networking don’t mix based solely on (flawed) traffic data seems really naive and a net veteran like Arrington ought to know better.
Briefly looking at their site, I see a reasonable number of ratings and a lot of articles with double digit comments. It probably is safe to say it isn’t a raging success, but without being able to get more details I wouldn’t be able to say whether or not it was a failure. As with all things, the internet is about trying different tactics, finding what works, refining what could work and dropping what doesn’t. There are few enough old media types willing to try anything new, so I am always impressed at those that do.
