Last week, Deadspin fronted a report from the Center for Media Research claiming that Yahoo! Sports had passed ESPN.com in both unique users and visitors. I found that curious, so I shot a note off to a friend of mine in the online sports business and asked him what he thought of the numbers. Here's how he responded:
Web metrics are notoriously unreliable--you'll see different numbers from Nielsen/Netratings, vs. Hitbox, vs. others. So take the numbers with a grain of salt, but these numbers are also the ones advertisers are using to determine who to buy. ESPN as a brand still resonates significantly more with the 18-34 set than Yahoo does... but a brand like FOX could probably usurp the 18-34s with ESPN more than Yahoo could.Also to consider: over the past few months, ESPN has made a strong push towards paid content with its Insider product which (for a reason I *still* don't understand) is very successful in terms of subs and revenue. This probably has hurt their traffic more than they realize. ESPN has stayed on top up to now with traffic rollups from Jayski and active.com (which I think are kinda BS, but that's neither here nor there).
Yahoo's Fantasy product drives a boatload of uniques and pageviews and increases time on site due to their 2M+ users (that was last year; might be significantly higher this year). ESPN broke 1M users this year with their free play, so it will be interesting to see these numbers play out over the football season.
Might ESPN.com be experiencing something similar with its Insider product that the New York Times is with Times Select?
It is the same principle as Times Select, which means both companies are valuing cold hard cash over traffic — which they should. Remember: Ratings by themselves are meaningless — they matter only insofar as they can be used as a tool to attract advertising and other revenue streams. If the ads and sponsorships aren’t pulling in the cash, you move on to something else.
Only certain types of online content compel people to open their wallets: Sports, p0rn, and financial data. ESPN is hitting the money spot.
Personally, I’ve given up on ESPN.com for the most part. It’s bloated with so much crap that it takes forever to load on my broadband connection; I can get practically the same information on Yahoo and other more streamlined sites.
I think ESPN and the NY Times are taking a step that a lot of web entities are going to have to take in order to remain viable. They just have to provide the right blend of paid and free content to attract new customers and get them to open up their wallets. Right now both are flubbing that pretty hard.
About web metrics, if I was paying for advertising based on Sitemeter or Hitbox, I might prefer to pour lighter fluid on my money and light it on fire instead. Every once in awhile take down your Sitemeter or Hitbox figure and compare that with your server log. On a good day mine will be 60-70%. How many visitors have javascript disabled, popup blockers, privacy monitors or firewalls blocking your cookie.
Add to that the fact that many sites use hits or page views and unique visitors interchangeably. 150 hits from 1 page view? That guy visits 10 pages on my old site and that is a quick 1500. If I turn Google Images or Yahoo/Altavista/MSN images back on, I could get upwards of 10,000 more page views a day easy. How many of them would even visit the site instead of just looking at the picture? 1%? This would not bother me that much except that I have heard a constant stream of this bs in press releases about mainstream sites lately.
I dont understand why ESPN and the NY Times think people would want to pay for what they are currently offering. A lot of articles are simply not worth it. Take a well researched, fact-laden article, and surround it with more photos and audio, links, a related bibliography, related statistics, a contact the author feature, a rating tool, and comments, and then it might be worth paying for.
But I am going to fork over cake to read what is bothering Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd this week? No.
Not sure how much the Insider stuff affects traffic, but for me it’s much simpler. ESPN has tarted up their sites in all kinds of ways. Five (!) column design. Animated ads in odd places. Scrolling content. Colored text on colored backgrounds.
I just don’t like looking at it.
This causes me a crisis, because Soccernet (an ESPN property) has the best soccer coverage around. Yet they just redesigned it to look more like the rest of the ESPN site. Ugh. Not to mention, they have continual performance problems, returning odd Page Not Found errors when under high load. Fellas? Might want to fix that before working on the redesign.
Anyway, I still go to Soccernet, but for American sports, Yahoo is just as good for content… and miles superior for interface. I don’t know why I would ever visit the ESPN site. What am I going to get there, that I can’t get on Yahoo? Oh, riiiight… Insider.
No thanks!
Cisko hits it.
IMO, this is not simply an issue of subscriber content or pay per reads.
ESPN’s navigation is terrible, especially in non IE browsers. It takes too many clicks to get to one’s fantasy teams in ESPN, and their answer to this is encouraging users to dload the ESPN Toolbar (which, as they describe at http://games.espn.go.com/content/home/story?id=1806418 , requires windows XP and something called EI 6+. Perhaps they mean IE 6+, but either way, I’m not installing their trash.)
Users want fast loading, easy to access information. We don’t mind if there are ads, just keep them out of our way and keep them quiet. That’s why yahoo sports deserves to continue kicking espn in the rear.