Categories: OLD Media Moves

Twitter IPO not drawing interest from CNBC.com readers

Allen Wastler, the managing editor of CNBC.com, writes that there’s not much interest from the business news website’s readers about the upcoming initial public offering by Twitter.

Wastler writes, “It’s true. We have all sorts of software (programs with names like Omniture and Chartbeat) that count visitors and Web traffic. They tell us what people are reading.

“And it ain’t about Twitter.

“For example, this past week Twitter set the offering range for its IPO—big news that set our CNBC newsroom a-buzzing. In the end, though, that story didn’t even bust our Top 10 for the day. Heck, even when we made it the featured story on the website, the best popularity rank it could sustain was third place, briefly. It went straight to 15th within the hour.

“Just check out the above chart we whipped up comparing the traffic on the Twitter IPO story with our top stories on Thursday. People were much more interested in banking troubles and Mark Zuckerberg’s real estate foibles.

“The story is the same for other major Twitter-in-the-news days. It never breaks the Top 10. Now you could argue that the Twitter news simply coincided with news that was more important (like Zuck’s living arrangements).

“But when you compare the reader attention paid to Facebook and LinkedIn stories on their respective “big news” days leading up to their IPOs, the argument falls flat. They hit the Top 10 every time.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.