Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The minefield of comparing print and online hits

There is an interesting analysis of the methods of comparing Print and online page impressions by Dan Thorton( Ht-Martin Belam)

comparing print and online readerships directly in this way is equivalent to comparing the number of people who drive cars with the number of people with vowels in their name.


He argues that

If you’re taking shared readership of print products into account, then surely you’d also need to factor in people reading newspaper website content without ever being logged as a visitor to the site?


That is people visiting through RSS,aggregation etc and therefore according to Dan

the numbers are far less important than looking at data trends. I’d much rather base a theory or business strategy on a few years of data showing a rise in one area and a fall in another. The numbers are rough guides to point towards when the trends are in the same area, but that’s all.

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