Analysis - by Patrick Thornton on Friday, October 2, 2009 13:51 - 1 Comment
Engagement, not unique visitors should be No. 1 goal
Unique visitors can be very misleading, especially since so many Web users are drive by users that stop by to view one Web page, before quickly going elsewhere.
What’s more important is how we engage with our users. Drive by users aren’t worth nearly as much to advertisers (or to content producers) as dedicated users. Try this statistic on for good measure:
The average Facebook user spent 5 hours and 14 minutes on the site in July, whereas the average NYTimes.com user spent about 14 minutes.
Which one of those users is more valuable? Obviously, Facebook users are much more dedicated users than NYTimes.com users. Facebook is also getting less drive by users, and drive by users aren’t that valuable. NYTimes.com is one of the better journalism sites out there, and it does fairly well — as far as news sites are concerned — with time spent per user per month.
But news sites — and most Web sites — can learn a lot from leading social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is continually adding more features to make Facebook sticker: chat, applications (popular games like Farmville are making the site very sticky), the news feed, etc. In fact, time spent on Facebook has soared 699 percent since April 2008.
News organizations need to figure out how to grok what leading social networks are doing, because news Web sites need to get stickier. Clearly, people want to be social. News organizations need to embrace being social and start engaging their users better. News has to become a conversation.
Getting more users is good, but getting more engagement out of each user is better.
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You don’t really answer this question, nor justify the blog’s title. Ok, so Facebook users spend much more time at Facebook.com tha NYTimes’s users spend at NYTimes.com. So what?
You don’t explain why that should be the No. 1 goal, nor why FB users are more valuable. FB users don’t necessarily click around on more ads in their extra 5 hours, but they do necessarily use more server resources, so it’s conceivable (unlikely) that Facebook would be better off *financially* if users spent less time on their site and they instead pointed users to other sites, like Flickr or Vimeo, for examples, for photos and images.
One of the early praises for Google was exactly because it lowered engagement, even while increasing stickiness: You could bypass the search result page entirely by clicking “I feel lucky!”. Engagement’s obviously changed for Google, but I’d love to hear specific arguments for why engagement is better for newspaper sites beyond, engagement is good because it’s good.