Is a new metric needed for newspaper web stats?
Posted by
Martin Stabe
on 25 June 2007 at 08:00
Tags: ABCe, Online
The standard metric for measuring newspaper websites’ traffic statistics could be changed to daily unique users, Journalism.co.uk reports.
Speaking on Friday at a conference organised by the Association of Online Publishers, ABCe chief executive Richard Foan said daily figures would allow publishers to better reflect fluctuations in traffic over the course of a month. The propsal will be discussed by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) when it meets in August.
Former Observer managing editor John Duncan, now a media strategy consultant, has recently argued on his blog that the monthly unique user metric misleadingly overstates the importance of newspapers’ online readership figures.
Simon Waldman, Guardian Media Group’s director of digital strategy and president of the AOP, wrote in January that a daily unique users figure would be the most comparable to print circulation figures, and said these figures should be used more often.
