If Google Visitors Are Worthless, It's Only Because Newspaper Execs Don't Know What They're Doing

from the turning-away-visitors? dept

Once again, Danny Sullivan is ripping to shreds the arguments being made by newspaper execs who are talking about how Google is a "parasite" on their content, despite sending tons of traffic. In this episode, Danny looks at the silly claim that visitors from Google are worthless, by comparing the situation to a regular shopfront and how they handle browsers vs. requiring a fee to get inside in the first place. He also goes on to look at how the Wall Street Journal (to which he is a subscriber) tries to monetize him online, and the only clear conclusion is that if News Corp. execs think that traffic from Google is worthless, it's only because they're making it worthless by doing an incredibly poor job capitalizing on all that free traffic.

Filed Under: newspapers, traffic, visitors
Companies: google

Mentioning 'Hits' Is Deceptive Advertising In The UK?

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

Over in the UK, it appears that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has decided that putting the number of hits your website gets into an ad is somehow deceptive advertising. Now, most techies recognize that "hits" are widely discredited as a measure of visitors. But they're not deceptive in and of themselves. They're accurate in showing exactly what they claim: hits, which includes any connection to a server (i.e., every image on a page counts as a separate hit, so a single website could have many, many hits). The fact that some people don't recognize the difference between a hit and a unique user doesn't necessarily mean that a "hit" is deceptive. If the company were saying that 5 million hits equaled 5 million users -- then you could sorta see how their might be an argument concerning deceptive advertising, but just using hits doesn't seem deceptive at all.

Filed Under: deceptive advertising, hits, uk, visitors