Online Media Cultist

Hang out with any website publisher long enough, and the subject will eventually turn to traffic. Numbers. Depending, the terms uniques, page views, impressions, or even hits may be tossed around. All web publishers are interested in the subject, even if some take a pointed disinterest in knowing how many people are visiting their site.

A Seth Godin piece called Silly Traffic got me to thinking about the subject last week. He smartly points out that most traffic that hits any site, perhaps 75% or more, is “unfocused” and therefore largely useless in a general sense except in beefing up site page views and, perhaps, fragile publisher egos.

In other words, most of the time, a vast majority of people who land on any website aren’t sure what they’re looking for, are confused once they land there, and are apt to take off again within a few seconds or less. The best a publisher can hope for in such cases is that they’ll accidentally or purposefully click an ad on the way out!

A great majority of this unfocused traffic is driven by search, particularly Google search. For some reason, a story I wrote on the most popular websites in the US in February ranks very high on Google for searches for “most popular websites,” so I get a lot of traffic hitting that story. But most of the time Site Meter records that the visit length was one second, so where’s the value in that?

Godin advises that publishers should simply ignore unfocused traffic (as opposed to stressing out over SEO or seeking ways to “lure the bouncers”) and instead focus on deeply engaging existing users.

In other words, return visitors are treasures for publishers, highly valued entities that need to be tended and minded and catered to. That’s why I was so excited to trumpet about hitting 200 RSS subscribers yesterday. All of y’all are people who arrived here – somehow, someway – and found the experience valuable enough to take action to add the RSS feed so that future posts would be automatically sent to you.

So while I’m apt to “stats junkie” out as much as the next guy/gal/geeky web publisher extraordinaire, I definitely try to keep the silly traffic quotient in mind. Google search is fine, and traffic stemming from StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit is all well and good, but return visitors are the prize which must be eyed.

How do you generate return visitors? Well, that’s a subject that can take some time to get into. I suppose the simple and not terribly magical answer is to write great content consistently, network with publishers and influential types who write similar kinds of content (and read and engage on their sites), and then hope to get linked.

Those links will bring focused traffic: people who know what they want and recognize it right away when they get there. Those are the kind of folk most likely to convert to regular visitors.

On a personal note, I’ll throw three sites out there that have been greatly beneficial of late: Techmeme, Twitter, and Friendfeed. Knowing what’s being said (and not said) on Techmeme, and engaging in the Twitter and Friendfeed communities is a dynamite tool for people writing about Internet-related topics to generate links, focused traffic, and regular visitors.

Other people have also been talking about stats and their relationship with them of late. Jason Kaneshiro at Webomatica is distracted by blog statistics, and has limited himself to checking them once a month. Louis Gray, on the other hand, provides in depth analysis of his site’s remarkable growth over the last four months or so. As a stats fiend, I love that kind of stuff!

comScore has released a report on global Internet traffic for May, and the usual suspects are at the top of the list: Google sites are still tops on the Internets, with over 527 million unique visitors, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner, and eBay. Wikipedia now sits at the #6 slot, which shows the continued and enormous popularity of the wiki-based community-run encyclopedia of everything and everyone.

I found the following line to be the most striking in the report:

There were 772 million people online worldwide in May (defined as those individuals age 15 or older who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in the last 30 days), an increase from 766 million in April, representing a 16 percent penetration of the worldwide population of individuals age 15 or older.

So six million more adults accessed the Internet in May 2007 than in April 2007. 16 percent penetration.

For all that’s happened online over what is really a short period of time, for all the billions of web pages published and trillions of communications that have taken place, a huge swath of the global population has yet to take part.

Growing up in the 1980s, I clearly recall my family getting its first microwave oven, its first VCR. I played handheld games featuring LCD red dots blipping around a tiny black screen. This was the height of technology at the time, and it was glorious.

Where will we be 20 or 25 years from now? If we can manage not to blow ourselves up and combat the scariest of the world’s problems, the future really is wide open.

Between the Lines wonders what percentage of the world’s population should be online.

There’s lots of techie and geeky buzz about Justin.tv of late, an EdTV scenario made real in which a random tech-warrior of the geeked out west (that would be Justin) records himself 24/7 amidst Silicon Valley adventures.

Not too long ago, another .tv had some buzz, or at least some paid buzz behind it: Bud.tv, the Anheuser-Busch backed site that was supposed to usher in a new era of original online video content, presumably aimed at right-thinking sports-loving beer-swilling young gents.

However, after a massive outlay of between $30 million and $40 million, traffic has plummeted some 40% – from 253,000 in February to 152,000 in March – according to Advertising Age. Hilariously, AdAge rubs salt in the wound by noting that according to ratings service Quantcast, Bud.tv currently sits between a porn site and the “comprehensive source for sheet rubber” in terms of popularity on the Internet.

Just as in politics, money can get you somewhere, but it can’t take you all the way. Media Landscaping gets to the heart of the matter by noting that: “These Ad-Driven-Traffic models will never hold up long term without really compelling content; which to this point they do not have.” It’s then pointed out – and I hugely agree – that original and expensive online video isn’t enough. Other kinds of content, blogs, podcasts, as well as the ability to embed that content anywhere are essential parts of any new large scale online media play.

By the way, Justin’s still sleeping at the moment I’m writing these words. Wake up dude!