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.

Earnings Season - AH Belo is in the weeds with Lee

More bad news in earnings season. AH Belo (AHC) just reported their earnings along with a massive buyout offer for about 15% of the workforce. However, the worst news isn't stated in the press release or in either of two long missives turned out by their CEO, but is in an article in one of their own papers.

The money line states that Internet revenue was down 12% for the quarter compared to a year ago.

Uh. Oh. The growth engine has stalled.

That's the same issue as Lee, but even more extreme. AH Belo is both part of the Yahoo consortium and Classified Ventures, which is relevant because these are the types of efforts that have been undertaken to usher in the age of the Internet for newspaper companies. Lee is only part of the Yahoo deal, not Classified Ventures. From all external measures, AH Belo is jumping into the industry transformation, but is still having issues with Internet revenue.

The answer thus far is a slash and burn. They've set out a goal to double Internet revenue by 2011, but with this setback that might be quite a lofty goal.

Earnings season - LEE's big issue

The earnings season is upon us and Lee Enterprises (LEE), just reported the worst thing that could happen for newspapers. Sure their profit was down considerably, but the real shocker was in the online revenue.

Online revenue was down just over nine percent.

Newspapers have been calling for online to be their growth engine for the longest time. As print revenues decline, the assumption was that online revenue would grow to offset the losses. Even the most bulish didn't think that online could replace all of the losses in print, but nearly everyone thought growth would continue to explode in the onine realm.

So I'll repeat: Lee's online revenue was down over nine percent.

No one will deny the losses in print, but if newspaper companies can't grow online their hopes are even dimmer than expected. Thus far Lee Enterprises is the only newspaper company that has reported losing revenue online, but there's still a few left to report.

Scripps and their spinoff

Today's breakup into two companies by Scripps is pretty telling of Wall St.'s opinions of local media. The logic was that local properties are very different than national ones. E.W. Scripps (SSP) became local media only, but kept the original name. The new, nationally focused company became Scripps Networks Interactive (SNI). SNI was given the cable networks and the "pure-play" interacive properties.

Before the split, SSP was trading around 41.50,

With a few minutes left in the day SSP = 3, and SNI = 40 - Analysts had the estimated 8 for SSP, and 40 for SNI.

Some 90% of the value of the stock was with the national properties, not the local ones.

The revenue split is about 60% SNI, 40% SSP (as split).

Local looks more and more like dead money to traders. Another data point is the split for Belo/AH Belo (BLC, AHC) - for which both have been trading drastically to the downside since the split.