Top newspaper sites in minutes spent
Cory Bergman December 14th, 2007
For the month of November, here are the top newspaper sites ranked by total (not average) time spent:
1. NYTimes.com (550,035 minutes)
2. USAToday.com (136,603)
3. WashingtonPost.com (145,083)
4. Boston.com (79,712)
5. WSJ.com (72,110)
And there are some big surprises with the rest of the list of the top 30. For example, Chron.com (Houston Chronicle) beats LATimes.com handily. So does AZCentral.com. But the debate continues: is total time spent better than unique users when ranking top news sites? Or is it a combination of both? And, of course, there’s the whole issue of accuracy and standardization in metrics, which is the subject of this story today.
3 Comments Add your own
1. FrankM | December 15th, 2007 at 8:54 am
I don’t see how Chron.com is a big surprise. The site has a nice clean design, many RSS feeds (I have a whole netvibes page for theirs), and best of all–a large selection of Comics in an application that doesn’t limit you to one per page. (hint: the parameter in the URL “cpp” is “comics per page”. Ramp that up to 130, and read away.)
2. Barry | December 15th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Chron.com has to be one of the worst in terms of flying, scrolling and pop up ads of any newspaper site I have gone to. I challenge someone to find a site with more.
3. Joe MacDonald | December 17th, 2007 at 8:54 am
People tend to forget that Houston has one of the biggest populations in the country, so it’s not surprising to see their local papers show up strong.
On another topic, being in the online business, our company has developed a stat we use to track the new reality where time spent is equally or more valuable than clicks, without forgetting the importance of clicks.
We call it Site Engagement, and the formula we use is:
SE = (PageViews / Unique) + (Avg Time Spent in minutes)^2
In English, that is the number of pageviews per unique user, added to the squared value of the average time (in minutes) spent on the site.
We find this gives us a number that not only takes into account the interactivity of the site (thru PageViews) but it gives even more value to time spent.
We find that having a SE over 100 or even 200 is really pleasing to advertisers.
In the future we are going to find a way to tie in ad impressions to a formula, but that would probably be a separate metric, since advertising flows from Site Engagment, not vice versa.
Leave a Comment
(Please keep URLs out of the comment body or the spam filter will block you.)Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed