USAToday’s Social Network Experiment May Not Be Paying Off, says TechCrunch.
When USAToday relaunched its site in March as a social network around news, I and others thought it was big news.
They integrated Pluck’s new Social Media Suite, a group of social networking products that a number of high profile news sites have adopted. Overnight, USAToday went from being an old school news site to something much different. Readers could now create profiles, comment on articles, vote to recommend articles to others (very Digg-like), etc.
Given the insane ability of social networks to drive traffic, this seems like a fairly safe promise to make. But so far, the data we have says it hasn’t paid off in terms of unique visitors or page views for USAToday.
Here’s the Compete.com data, showing monthly visitors down from 14 million in March to about 10 million today, a 29% drop in unique visitors.
Comscore also shows a decline, although a smaller one. March unique visitors were 7.3 million; June was 6.3 million - a 14% drop. Total pageviews were 70 million in March v. 59 million in June - a 16% drop.
Neither Comscore or Compete are perfect, but the trend seems to suggest the relaunch isn’t performing well.
No, wait….Nevermind. USAToday Says Traffic Way Up, USATODAY.com, recorded a 20% year-over year increase in traffic for the month of July 2007 and a month-over-month growth of 24% according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
According to Seattle-based M:Metrics, 12.3 million consumers in the U.S. and Western Europe reported accessing a social networking site on their mobile device in June. A majority of those occurred in the U.S., where 7.5 million, or 3.5 percent of all subscribers, logged in. MySpace and Facebook are the top two social networking sites accessed via mobile in both the U.S. and UK. MySpace attracts 3.7 million U.S. and 440,000 UK mobile users.
According to Internet Outsider US advertising revenue at the four big online media companies — Google, Yahoo, AOL and MSN — grew by $1.3 billion in Q2, or 42% while advertising revenue at 15 big television, newspaper, magazine, radio, and outdoor companies (Time Warner, Viacom, CBS, etc.) shrank by $280 million in Q2, or 3%.
Combined U.S. advertising revenue at the 4 online & 15 traditional media (above), increased 8% year over year in Q2, to $13.8 billion. The online portion of this pie grew from $3 billion to $4.2 billion (23% share to 30% share). The offline portion, meanwhile, shrank from $9.9 billion to $9.6 billion (77% share to 70% share). The online companies, in other words, picked up 7 percentage points of market share in a single year.
The only traditional media business that grew U.S. advertising year-over-year in Q2 was Outdoor (up 13%).
Meanwhile:
- Television (cable and broadcast) shrank 1%, or $50 million
- Print (magazines and newspapers) shrank 5%, or $170 million
- Radio (terrestrial) shrank 7%, or $105 million
The Bivings Report has created a list of top 10 Newspaper Websites.
- New York Times — loaded with great features, and, as of August 7, the website dropped its paid-for content.
Washington Post — Not only do we like the design and the navigability of the Post’s website, but we really love its database applications.
- USA Today — Social networking. Social networking. Social networking.
- Houston Chronicle — We like the non-newspaperish feeling that this homepage exudes.
- Denver Post — Registering with the site automatically gives you your own blog and your own photo gallery for uploading and sharing photos.
- Knoxville News Sentinel — When we talk about de-cluttering sites and making them look “clean”, this is what we mean.
- Fresno Bee — Great homepage, interesting CrimeMap feature, and overall just a solid site with lots of technology.
- Austin American Statesman — Unique layout and coloring, also giving points for allowing anyone to blog and for linking to them from the homepage.
- Tennessean — Blog-like feel of this site’s homepage helped it make our list.
- San Jose Mercury New — We like the simple layout and the inclusion blog headlines, user photos, forum titles, and podcasts.
Related DailyWireless Newspaper articles include; Gannett Mobilizes News, E-Books Now, Open Ads, Wireless News Stand, Calacanis on Newspapers and Advertising: The Right Online/Print Mix.
