As is the case with circulation numbers, online traffic numbers need to be read with a grain of salt. “Those numbers are all funky,” adds Alan Mutter, a former newspaper editor and venture capitalist who now writes Reflections of a Newsosaur, an influential media blog. “Different people get different counts from the same website all the time.” Mutter served as the No. 2 editor of the San Francisco Chronicle before joining InterMedia Partners, a media private equity firm. He argues that the only meaningful statistic that matters is how many are actually paying for the privilege. “The reason why it is important to charge people for circulation is to validate the passion of your audience for what you produce. That’s the argument for charging for content on the web,” he says. In addition to 20m visitors per month, WSJ.com claims 1.079m paying subscribers. The Financial Times website, FT.com, has 117,000 paying subscribers (up 18 per cent in the first half of 2009) in addition to its 1.4m non-paying registered users worldwide and average monthly unique users of 9.8m.
Circulation versus influence There is little doubt that so-called “influencers” are migrating online. A recent study by Forbes Insights and Google determined that the “internet has become the chief source of business information” for the C-suite. The survey of 354 top executives at large US companies with annual sales of greater than $1bn found that during work hours 70 per cent of executives prefer to read “traditional” media online rather than in print (30 per cent), and 69 per cent prefer to access “traditional broadcast media” online rather than over the air. Brunswick’s own research with investors and analysts (see Are analysts and investors engaging with new media?) shows a similar trend.
As these readers move online, the world’s most enduring news brands still claim their attention. According to its 2008–2009 Opinion Leaders Study, research company Erdos & Morgan found that the New York Times reaches nearly 61 per cent of US opinion leaders, followed closely by the Wall Street Journal, which reaches 59.5 per cent, NBC Nightly News, with 48.1 per cent reach, USA Today, with 48 per cent, and ABC World News Tonight, with 44.4 per cent. According to Erdos & Morgan’s 2009 study of the reach of digital media among opinion leaders, Google News reaches 46.8 per cent of opinion leaders, followed by the New York Times, CNN.com, Yahoo! News, the Washington Post, MSNBC.com and the Wall Street Journal. What is behind the enduring lure of these brands? Chiefly, the fact that new online news outlets are viewed with more skepticism than their established print, broadcast and cable counterparts. According to Pew’s 2008 State of the News Media report, of the seven online news organizations it evaluated, none is viewed as highly credible by even a quarter of online users able to rate them.
What does that mean? Plus ça change, says George Janson, Managing Partner and Director of Print at Mediaedge:cia, which buys advertising space for clients including Xerox, MetLife, Chevron, and Accenture. “To reach the C-suite, the people who are the decision-makers, there are still only so many places to reach them.”
Or to put it another way: Don’t let the declining circulation numbers at the traditional business outlets mislead you into believing that their influence is declining. While the data is difficult to interpret, the opposite may in fact be true.