Yahoo and Traffic - 100M PV and counting

In a report by Editor and Publisher, it is noted that Yahoo has driven over 100M pageviews to member newspapers. While this number is impressive, its even more startling in context.

Anthony Moor of The Dallas Morning News states that a "buzzed" article can "deliver 27% of a days page views and 65% of a days unique visitors"

What's not to love about that?

An awful lot.

Note the dramatic difference between pageviews and uniques. Traffic this lopsided must be consuming far less than the average pageviews per visitor. More than likely that traffic is seeing only one pageview.

A second problem is where this traffic is likely originating. My guess would be that a large majority is coming from outside the local area. This means that the local advertisers on the page are receiving very little value from the traffic, and that its unlikely that these visitors will return.

Those are three very significant issues: low engagement, low relevance of advertising, and a low ability to build a brand. It foreshadows a move to selling content by the article.

This situation may define "a rock and a hard place" A site manager wouldn't want to turn away this traffic, but its very unlikely to deliver long term value. The best hope is to develop a good recommendation engine that can try to hang on to the traffic once it's on the site, and to deliver national advertising against the bump in traffic. The second factor is being able to develop "buzzworthy" content regularly enough that your brand can disintermediate Yahoo as the aggregate. That, however, is far easier said than done.