[Citation Needed]

This week's post is going to be slightly different, because I'm going to be doing some investigation.  I'm not sure I can count as an investigative journalist, because I'm not a journalist and I don't really do much investigation, so this is just going to be a one off.  This weekend you may or may not have heard that The Times has announced that it is going to be going behind a pay wall as of early May.  Those of you who are aware of such things will have noted that I've talked about this in the past as I used to work for a publisher:

• What the publishing crisis meant for Web Analysts
• What are the different business models for Publishers
• Should publishers charge for content
• How publishers could charge for content

Well this post is going to be a look at what the effects of The Times moving to a paid content model is.  Let me start with the basic in case you didn't know.  If you want to access the site for one day, you are going to have to pay £1.  If you want to access the site for a week, you have to pay £2.  If you want to just look at the home page, then everything will be free.  If you subscribe to the print edition then you get free online access.

It all seems fairly straight forward (although someone may point out that I missing that they are keeping the timesonline site still running with other features - but by the sounds of it they are turning it off).

So this gives us a couple of questions, mainly will they actually make any money?  So lets turn it around to a different matter and look at how their current traffic looks.  According to a report in the Guardian, The Times got 21.4m unique browsers in January 2010, of which 8m were from the UK.  If you want to see their latest figures then you can download them from the ABCe website (ABCe are the industry auditors in this country). From their latest figures, they generated a total of 139,443,741 page impressions in February 2010, of which 74,258,775 were from the UK.  Unique browser figures were similar for the two months.

That's a lot of page impressions.

My past history dictates that a site will try and sell its advertising for about £20 - £45 per thousand (cpm).  I would have thought the Times would be on the lower end of that scale.  If you want to look at someone who has actually done some research into this (in the States) then there is some useful information at problogger.  He sites about $1.5 for a 1,000 impressions.  If we were going to be kind and convert that to pounds we could say that timesonline.co.uk could charge £10 per thousand.  Assuming they sold all of their UK ads and that they have two ads on every page that would equate to £15m in revenue every month from online advertising.  Scary amount really isn't it?  Is that enough to run a business?  It seems like it to me.  If they are going to get users to pay £8.66 for access to the website every month, they are going to have to generate about 1.7m users actively paying £2 a week every month for the site.

So going back to the 8m UK users they currently get, they are going to have to persuade just over a fifth of them to sign up to their services.

So let us start at the beginning and look at the competitor analysis tools.  The most popular of which is Alexa. They say that for the preceding sites, they get about 27% of users coming from Google.com or Google.co.uk:

You can see the US nature of Alexa here - The Times is clearly a UK based website, but here we think that the US version of Google is an upstream site more often.  Hitwise, in case you are wondering, says something remarkably similar (obviously with more .co.uk traffic), but obviously it is not publicly available, so I can't link to it.

I think you can safely assume that when The Times goes behind its paywall all of those visits are going to disappear - Google will not index any pages it cannot crawl and will not promote pages that users can't get to without subscribing - so you are losing quite a large part of your 8m in one quick shot.

It's also interesting that The Times appears to get a relatively large volume of traffic from news aggregators - eg the Drudge report and Facebook.  These presumably will disappear too at some stage, because aggregators don't like linking to pages that are behind firewalls.  Interestingly from my point of view as well are that the other sites on that list are other news websites.  It seems that the Times users don't only go to one website to read their news - they also look it up on the bbc.co.uk, telegraph.co.uk, guardian.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk.  They're all in the top 10 upstream sites for timesonline.

So how many of the remaining 5.7m user per month are actually going to start visiting the site?  Where do they come from.  Well they could come from one of the 8.7m inbound links that timeonline.co.uk currently has.  Could they come from one of the hundreds of links from the various social bookmarking sites that there are out there (eg Reddit or Digg).  You would have thought that this would be quite large.

Maybe they are focussing on their brand traffic.  I'm sure I've mentioned on here before that a great way of working out how well your brand is doing is to monitor how many times people are searching for your brand name.  It's quite a worrying trend that you can see on Google Trends.  They're not even anywhere close to some of the other big newspapers.  In order of fairness, I thought I would do the same graph using the websites options.

The one bit of data that I am really missing is the volume of visits that arrive via RSS feeds, email and/or typing in the URL.  Logically speaking these would seem to be the most likely to want to sign up to a subscription model.  The trouble is, how are they going to increase the number of people subscribing, when nobody can see what is underneath.  These are some of the questions that are going to be answered very soon.

So the questions I still have:

• Will they charge their advertisers more given that they will have more information about the users (registration insists on you telling them your address, for example).  This advanced advertising capability based on user demographics would seem to be a great way for them to charge users more and charge advertisers more.  I'm assuming that they will still advertisers, of course.  This could make up the shortfall in revenue from not as many users signing up to the scheme as they'd hoped.  How are the users going to feel about this though?
• Will they be able to persuade enough of their users to sign up and pay given that they are going to lose all of their deep linking.
• Will they do any redirecting of old links to new ones to try and persuade passing traffic to sign up.
• Do they understand that nobody will ever link to them again.  This will mean that if they are first with the exclusives, anyone else who writes about it will generate the links upon being asked for [citation needed]
• Will their journalists and columnists be happy to stay at an online publication of, say 1m readers, when they could move to a website of 20m?  This is a key one for me, because they will need a USP and 'news' won't be it - everyone can do that.  Columnists and journalists should be able to give that added extra to the site, but only if they aren't enticed away.  Breaking news isn't enough, because it is too easy to replicate elsewhere.

Will Clarkson be happy with a smaller readership?

This seems like it will be a good profit driver in the short term to prop up the newspaper whilst the advertising slows down and everyone works out a proper business model.  But in the long term this looks catastrophic.  Even if everyone else suddenly decides that they have to go down this route as well, it is a case of the last one standing is the winner.  People aren't just going to give up news, so they'll either subscribe or they'll move elsewhere.  My study above suggests that they're probably getting it elsewhere as well at the moment, so they'll have no incentive to give up their details to Murdoch.

I'm afraid I am going to have to agree with Jeff Jarvis on this one, it does indeed look like Murdoch has surrendered because he doesn't quite know what to do. Do you have any sources of information that I've missed that could help the debate?

Web Analytics Wednesday With Alec!

Ok, I should have written this post last week (what is it that Kate said about scent when she guest blogged and I said about Persuasion Architecture?), but I have recently been presenting at Web Analytic Wednesday in London.  For those of you not au fait with what this is, it is where a group of Analytics people get together in the downstairs of a pub and get drunk.  Seriously, though, first of all we all stand around a screen whilst someone witters on about something that may or may not be relevant to everyone there for about half an hour and then afterwards everyone has a drink and networks.  On previous occasions I've been more keen on doing some of the networking than listening to the presentations because they can seem a bit like a sales pitch.  Bob (who does an excellent job of organising) has tried to curtail this in the past to encourage people to speak on topics around their company, rather than directly on it.

However this month's version was very much different.  Why?  Because you had me speaking at the presentation and I don't sell anything.  Look around to the sides of this blog.  I really should start selling things, then I might be able to retire early and spend all my time giving away analytics advice for free.  Hang on, I get paid for that at the moment.  Anyway, my presentation was a bit different.  Because I work for a government organisation, it means I can give away some of the analysis that I did internally to outside people because it won't help any competitors.  We don't have any competitors.  More than that, I could do it with real figures, rather than using the percentages, plus I could push it at a real topic, rather than one manufactured to sell my product.  (PS thanks to Miles at Targetstone and Lawrence at Digital Analytics Review for their kind words).

This was actually a presentation that I'd done previously (twice at least) internally to the owners of a section of the site.  We were trying to work out what we should be doing to get more people looking at the section.  Rather than recreate that presentation here, I thought I would post what the analysis was, why I did it (how to recreate it) and what some of the recommendations were.

Why did you do the presentation?

The website has two real issues.  One of them is that it needs to tell you what you should do to comply with the law.  These are the regulations that you have to make sure that you do everything within your capability to comply with.  Some insist that you pay tax to the Government in a certain way, some say that if you don't do it then you'll be fined.  That about sums it up.

The other side of the coin is that just telling you to do things isn't that helpful, so you really need advice on how to do it.  Even if that means some advice on how to fill in your tax forms or other relations that you have to comply with.

Obviously for the regulations, if you need to know, you need to come to the site (or find it elsewhere, but mainly you'll need it so you'll have to come).  For the advice parts of the site, you may not know that you need the advice or how to use it.  More importantly there are plenty of people out there who are willing to make you pay for it.

One of the challenges we face is how do we promote the advice sections, get more people looking at it and then prove their worth.  This presentation was really looking at the how people interact with the section in the first place and helped waver some misconceptions and give us a bit of guidance on where our priorities lay.

What did you analyse?

Whilst I am going to point out here and now that the site is a government site, it doesn't run for profit, but it still has all the same principles as an eCommerce site.  You can still measure the success of your site, but you have to do it in a slightly different way.

So what did I do.  I think the first thing that you always need to do is break down your site traffic over time into the sections it sits at on the site (or the types of content, or however you like to break up your site).  There is nothing worse than looking at the very top level and then the bottom.  You need to work down layer by layer (like an onion).  Personally I always like (if I can) splitting those layers up into finding out not only how many visits to each of them there were, but also how many entered the site at a point in that section as well.  With this information it became fairly obvious for my section, 80% of the visits who viewed it also arrived at the site at it.

This means in the case of our site, the section in case was broken up into topic areas.  This was meant to be a convenient way of grouping the content together for the users, but it has an added side effect that it was useful for me to work out what the users were looking at.  You can do this really easily in most analytics tools, but it is often widely missed when coming to the actual reporting.  If you are using Omniture, use your hierarchy reports (we collect the breadcrumb trail in ours).  In Google Analytics it is set up to work based on the structure of the url (but if you look at the structure of this url, then you'll see it is a bit rubbish - you can work on that and customise it very easily to other parameters).  It appears in your Content drill down report.  It's vitally useful so make sure you look at it.

(2010 not quite as popular as 2008 on this blog, yet)

Next up, pick out your major navigation pages, do this using your pages report. Next you want to show how traffic is flowing to and from those pages as a whole.  The easiest way of doing this is to put the number of visits on the page and the number of entries on the page.  Now navigation pages work in two ways (predominantly, obviously there are shades of grey in the middle):

1. Landing page - this page needs to be set up so that users who navigate to it from outside know what is going on and there is the related scent to allow users to be able to flow through the site.  Work this out by looking at the referring domains/keywords
2. Non-Landing page - most of the users in this case are already on the site when they get to it.  This shouldn't really be treated any differently, per se, but when building your scent you need to look at where users came from using your clickstream analysis instead of your referring domains/keywords

In our case it was the second way, so we could work out where users navigated through the site.

The next step was to look at other major pages in the section (there are hundreds, so we can't do them all) and in this case you are probably going to see something a bit different. You are going to see that those pages almost always have large volumes of entries.  Here is the point with these pages, you really need to put the bounce rates on to these reports as well.  It is no use knowing that someone arrived at a page and not knowing what they did straight afterwards.  Half of them will bounce and they will be your main focus.

The next thing you want to do it look at your major conversion points.  Well in our case, just getting there was a really good start, but getting them to use tools was also important.  In your case it will be more likely that you'll want to focus on your sign ups or your sales.

The next step I wanted to look at particularly, was where people were clicking on the page to navigate onwards.  This is really useful using your clickmap or your next pages report (or however you want to do it in your reporting system).  I talked before about how I did this with ComputerWeekly and I would recommend doing this all the time if at all possible.

The outcome for us in this was that we were able to identify where people were most likely to click and hence this should be where our main area of focus should be.  This is a fairly obvious thing and actually helps us in the way that we've designed the site.

Finally I think somewhere that you should always look to focus on is where the users came from to get to the content.  Given above we've already stated 80% came from external sources, looking at those domains and keywords from search engines (where applicable) can be really informative.  It will help build a picture of the user.

What were the recommendations?

Well firstly it became apparent that we'd been building the site from the top downwards in terms of structure, but actually many users came from the bottom upwards because of search engines.  Therefore this led into a couple of key recommendations:

• Ensure that the content is grouped so that someone coming in from the bottom can find related content
• Make sure that the titles of the related content are descriptive irrespective of their higher navigation
• Make sure that the titles are scannable so that users are more likely to click on them
• Put more inline links in the content to get users navigating around

It was also immediately obvious that there were some glaring things going on with our traffic sources.  Namely that it was all search and all really long tail:

• Generate more visits from Government websites
• Generate more visits from commercial websites
• Work on building up a keyword footprint so that we can optimised the search traffic
• Get more links in the rest of the site from related content of high volume, high value sections to drive more internal traffic

And there we have it.  Really simple, isn't it?

Now all we need is for someone to volunteer in the commercial sector to present their data at the next Web Analytics Wednesday.  Anyone?

Pitchforks and Torches at Reddit because of 'Spammer'

Wow - I've just realised that I haven't posted anything about social media in over a year.  I'm slacking.  Then again I have posted more about social media than I have about SEO, so maybe I've been more slacking with my SEO than with my social media.  Anyway, this is a long rambling opening (for a change) so that I can tell you a bit about the goings on over at Reddit this week and what you can do to avoid it.  But before I do that - I thought I should point out the things I've written before, specifically about how you should work with Slashdot and how you should work with Digg in terms of working with the community.  One thing you should never forget though is that social bookmarking is all about networking.  To know it, you have to know the community.  To know the community you have to be in the community.

So what has been happening over at Reddit this week?  As you can imagine given the title of this post, it has been a bit of a witch hunt.  Why has it been a bit of a witch hunt?  Well it has all been about a 'moderator' called Saydrah.  But we'll come back to her later.  Really it all started with a nice young chap who used to write an online comic called the Oatmeal (including telling you how to get on the Reddit home page), but who has managed to get a deal with a publisher to get a book of his cartoons out.  "Hurray!" most of you will say, his comics were indeed funny.  However one poster wasn't quite so keen that it turned out that he used to work as at SEOmoz and that he may have been gaming the system over at Reddit (even though he had told his whole story on the site before).

This led into someone finding out that Saydrah also had a bit of a history regarding this sort of stuff, posting a self submission on Reddit explaining it and giving out all her contact details.  The difference with Saydrah was that she happened to also be a moderator, so it seemed like a conflict of interest having her being employed by a company to tell the other employees how to 'work' social media and then moderating a forum (ie deleting spam) from the very forum that the people in her company may have been submitting to.  She went on the offensive and posted a Q&A (these are called AMA - Ask me anything).  She was then accused of using her moderator powers to ban posts and promote her own above them.  However it wasn't enough, she was removed as a moderator from one of her subreddits.

To fully explain all of this, it probably needs me to talk a bit about SubReddits.  Reddit is made up of lots of categories called subreddits.  Some of these were created ages ago, but you can basically create a new one yourself if you really want to.  These subreddits then combine together to give you your overall Reddit that you can see on the homepage.  Each subreddit needs a moderator (or more than one, depending on its size) that can make sure that the posts aren't spam and people aren't putting comments into the posts that they shouldn't be.  These positions don't get paid, can't promote one post above another and generally speaking sound like a bit of a pain in the arse for little return.  There is even an Analytics subreddit (more on that in a moment).

So what lessons can me learn from this?  Well I think Saydrah probably would know more than anyone else about this (because she tells people at her company about it), but I think the word missing here is 'transparency'.  If you are doing something like this, then you probably need to make sure that everyone knows about it so that it can't come back to bite you:

"Hi, I am Alec.  I work for Business Link.  I'm a Web Analytics Manager.  I've got a vested interest, but here is something I have worked on"

You probably don't want to go about it in the way I've just said above.  However, if you're doing something in social media and it isn't immediately obvious what your vested interest is then you should be telling people.  When I am submitting and talking about BusinessLink content then I tend to tell people "I might be biased, because I work for BusinessLink, but..."  When I'm talking about my analytics, I usually go via my handle 'Whencanistop' so most people will know anyway (or will know with a cursory bit of Googling).  Of course the Oatmeal did this with all of his work and his AMA, but Saydrah was probably a bit slow in doing it.

Top tips when submitting your own content (or your companies content):

1. Do it from a branded account ID.  Seriously, people will appreciate it much more.
2. Make sure the content is unique and interesting for that community (I wouldn't submit my blog articles to Reddit, for example, because they aren't relevant).
3. Include in your submission information that you work for the company and any vested interest that you may have ("I appreciate your clicks because it generates ad revenue for my company and I get targeted on that - which is a bit screwy")
4. Make sure you are part of the community first - build up the trust, work out what they like, create interesting content that they'd like to read

There are obvious benefits to wanting to post articles on Reddit - the traffic volumes that you generate would be very useful for your ad revenue and the comments that you get back will be great for helping you create new content.

The Web Analytics SubReddit

Which brings me on to my final point.  I think we should rebuild the Web Analytics subreddit.  The Yahoo! forum we have is good, but is probably a bit clunky.  The subreddit would allow analytics people to submit blog posts (and there are a lot of them), it would allow the other analytics guys to rate and comment on the blog posts.  Plus we'd have one single repository available for all of us to communicate on.  Now all we need is a moderator that would be willing to do the task that those on the Yahoo! forum also do.  Sayrdah - you've got some free time now, do you fancy doing it?  Too soon?