BusinessWeek.com's page view woes

Peter Kafka of Silicon Valley Insider writes Wednesday that the real reason why BusinessWeek.com has seen a decrease in its page views is not because it doesn’t have — as some have suggested — enough fresh content, doesn’t do enough with video, and has lousy design and navigation.

Kafka wrote, “None of this rings true. (Disclosure: I worked at Forbes for 10 years, the last two at Forbes.com, and talk to plenty of folks there and at BusinessWeek.)  I don’t have access to internal traffic numbers, but the comScore numbers seem way off — Nielsen, for instance, credits BusinessWeek with 2.8 million uniques in August, while comScore gives BusinessWeek just 1.9 million. And the 64 million page views that comScore credits Forbes.com with is way, way, low.

“More importantly, no matter what BusinessWeek’s traffic really is, the reason it lags the big players isn’t because of content or design. It’s distribution. Forbes draws a huge percentage of its traffic via links from Yahoo, Microsoft’s MSN, and Time Warner’s AOL; Fortune and the rest of the Time Warner business pubs benefit from some of those links, plus promiment placement on CNN.com. Until BusinessWeek can get access to that kind of help from portals or other high-traffic sites, it’s always going to lag.”

Read more here. Meanwhile, 24/7 Wall Street’s Douglas McIntyre‘s opinion about BusinessWeek.com’s page view woes can be read here.