Assessing business news site traffic

Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer at Forbes, writes about web traffic for news sites, including business news sites.

Dvorkin writes, “Check out The Wall Street Journal. Paywall and all, traffic is finally growing after hanging in the low 20 million unique visitor range for the first three quarters of 2015. It shot to 26.7 million in October and then 33.1 million in December, although its exclusive mobile traffic remains below the magic 50% mark. That says something about its demographic.

“BusinessInsider, on a traffic tear for years, peaked at 45.3 million in July and then began a decent (to a low of 37.6 million in November) shortly before its purchase by Germany’s Axel Springer in late September. It’s definitely tapping the millennial crowd, with 25.4 million exclusive mobile visitors by year’s end, though the question to ask is at what CPMs?

“And how’s The Mayor doing? Near the start of the year, Bloomberg.com launched a redesign that folded in Businessweek.com, too. In October 2014, the two separate sites combined for 25.4 million unique visitors. In December 2015, the one big Bloomberg.com site attracted slightly less than that, or 25.1 million visitors. And rather anemic mobile-only usage (only 8 million) is hardly growing at all. Perhaps that’s why The Mayor, a terminal junkie, suggested in a staff meeting that maybe he didn’t need a web site after all.”

Read more here.