BusinessWeek.com's Traffic Woes About Distribution, Not Content

Peter Kafka | September 12, 2007 7:08 PM

Businessweek Why doesn't BusinessWeek do better online? At 24/7 Wall St, Doug McIntyre analyzes comScore data that ranks BusinessWeek.com 21st among financial websites, and indicates that the site's monthly pageviews have plummeted from 27 million in August 2006 to 11 million last month. McIntyre suggests that BusinessWeek's problem is that it doesn't have enough fresh content, doesn't do enough with video, and has lousy design and navigation.

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 (MSFT) MSN, and Time Warner's (TWX) 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.

UPDATE: BusinessWeek.com Editor John A Byrne responds.

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6 Comments

John A. Byrne said:
I have no idea why the comScore numbers bear no relationship to reality, but here are the facts: In August, traditionally one of the weakest months for business and financial sites, Omniture shows us with more than 7 million uniques, up some 13% from the previous year and nearly four times the comScore data. We recorded some 42 million page views in August, nearly four times as much as comScore reported. We had more than one million downloads alone on our podcasts that month. Our reader engagement is at record levels: some 6,000 comments from readers are made to our stories monthly; the page views on our blogs are up by 25% in the past year. We're the only business and financial website to have won a prestigious National Magazine Award this year, and the only one to be named one of the hottest ten websites in the past two years. We update our site several times a day with original analytical journalism--as many as 25 new pieces of content daily. In the past few months, we've broken dozens of stories, from insider trading at UBS, to the hedge fund mess at Bear Stearns, to the stock picking scandal at CNBC, to Wal-Mart's latest miscues and misadventures. Video is and has been prominently featured on our home page every day, and we have more than 2,000 videos on the site. We've just launched a new managing channel that is far superior to anything currently available on the web. In short, we're alive and well, thriving and growing, offering enterprise journalism every day that makes a meaningful difference to our readers. John A. Byrne, editor-in-chief, BusinessWeek.com.
Peter Kafka said:
Hi Doug. Let me clarify: BusinessWeek does have distribution deals, as do most major financial web pubs. But different deals have different terms, and different portals treat content differently. The point being that BusinessWeek's content is not distributed nearly as widely from big traffic sites as, say, Forbes.
You are also correct to note that Fortune is part of CNN Money, which I was trying to acknowledge when I referred to "Fortune and the other Time Warner business pubs." Apologies for not being clearer.
douglas mcintyre said:
Fortune does not have an independent site. It is part of CNN Money. There is, therefore, no way to compare Fortune online to either BusinessWeek or Forbes.
douglas mcintyre said:
The problem with the analysis is that BusinessWeek does have distribution deals. One is with Yahoo! Finance, the largest business and investing portal. Another is with MarketWatch.

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