Here are some basic rules to get listed.
1) Original Content: Simply reproducing news from other websites will not work. You need to have original content on your website.
2) Multiple Authors: Simple blogs with good content will not get included in Google News. This is because Google News wants multiple authors to “qualify” a website as a news source.
3) Organizational Structure: Google News includes articles only from sources that could be considered organizations; generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, the availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. Hence, reviewing a website should give evidence of an organization.
This may seem like a very difficult task but below are 10 tips that should help you before submitting your site to Google News.
1) Website Template: Your website should look like a news source. Avoid any template that remotely resembles a blog. The design of your home page is important and should clearly mention which industry your website covers.
2) Content Management System: Your website Content Management System (CMS) should be geared to handle news-type content. Your CMS should have a URL rewrite engine so that it generates flat-search engine friendly URLs — those with keywords, rather than something like “yourwebsite.com/article.asp?=123.?456.” This not only will help in crawling, but also in Google News ranking. Avoid a CMS that generates more than two variables in the URLas it can create crawling problems.
3) Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).
4) About Us and Contact Pages: Make these pages prominent on your website and one click away from the home page. A “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. You should also have a URL that is a directory of contributors and provide names of all your authors and editors, preferably with their email addresses. Try to give more information about your company and what it does in the “About Us” page.
5) Article Format: Each article format should include a title, author name, publication date and time (optional) and a minimum of 250-300 words in the article body.
6) Article Title: Set the title tag on the HTML page to the title of the article. The title should be displayed prominently above the text of the article. Avoid hyperlinks in the title. Title length should be 2-22 words. However, try to avoid very long or very short titles. If you are covering some big publicly-listed companies, include their name in the title. This will help your article appear if anyone is tracking those companies, either in Google News or through their email alert service.
7) Number of Articles: Chances are, a website with 10 total articles applying to be included in Google News will be rejected outright — it doesn’t give the impression of authority or heavy activity. Therefore, I recommend that you have at least 100 articles before you even think of completing the application form.
8) Article Frequency: Try to add at least three new articles every day. The more new articles you add the better, because once an article loses its “News” value, it will stop getting visitors from Google News.
9) Images and Video: As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Having a few images will make your news site stand out. And the same goes with videos. However, articles that are solely images and/or videos will not be included in Google News.
10) Advertising: Avoid too little or over-the-top advertising. Too little means your website does not attract enough visitors, whereas too much advertising might make one question your motive in getting your website listed with Google News.
Once you have covered these 10 points, apply for Google News inclusion. You will be asked to provide your site location information (City, State/Province, Country) and contact information URL and a URL that lists a directory of contributors. You can also select what topic(s) your site covers on this page. The Google News team will then respond to your request, generally within a few days to a week’s time. If your website is rejected, don’t give up. Many times, the Google News team
gives a reason for not including your website. Correct the oversight(s) and reapply.
Once you get an inclusion confirmation you can check which articles were crawled by using this command in Google News — Source: Website name. If your website contains paid content, use the “First click free” concept. Configure your Web servers to not serve the registration page to Google crawlers, identified as “User Agent — Googlebot.” You can configure this in a way so that the first article view by a Google News user doesn’t require a subscription. But all other links on this article page are trapped, which means if the user clicks anywhere else on the page, then they will be prompted to sign up.
After getting listed with Google News, your priorities should be ensuring trouble-free running of your website and adding the latest news to attract traffic. Below are some general tips which should help:
1) Webmaster Tools: Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools for News. It’s very useful in trouble-shooting your news website.
2) Hosting: This will help smooth crawling for the Google News bot. And if your article hits the first few spots in Google News for an important keyword, you will likely see some serious traffic which will need stable hosting. If there are any problems with hosting, you will see indicators in webmaster tools — errors in crawling or other problems.
3) Article Updates: Avoid article updates, because currently Google News crawls each article URL only once. Hence any update to an article after Google News has crawled it will not be reflected on Google News.
4) Google News Sitemap: Creating a Google News Sitemap will not affect your rankings. But having a Sitemap gives you more control by informing Google News which articles specifically to crawl. Sitemaps also allow you specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date or keywords that help determine where your article belongs in Google News.
5) Feeds: Have RSS feeds for your news so that your visitors can subscribe. Use Feedburner to create feeds that are compatible with the most popular feed readers. Have a button on your home page where readers can click to subscribe to your feeds.
6) Content Ideas: Subscribing to press release distribution feeds will help you get the latest information coming out of your industry. You can create a journalist login with PRNewsWire, BusinessWire, MarketWire or PRWeb and set your preferences for receiving press releases. These releases can give you ideas or certain figures to help you create unique news articles. Apart from these, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds from industry websites or set email alerts for some industry keywords on Google News.
Google News is not the only player in the game, but it is the largest and most likely to send you hordes of visitors. Listed below are two other websites where you can submit your news site:
1) Yahoo News: Apply for Yahoo News inclusion at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/forms/submitsource.html.
2) Topix.net: Find relevant news categories at http://www.topix.net/ then click the Feedback button at the bottom of the page. On this page, under “Are we missing a news source?” you will find a link to submit your site.
The aim for your news website should be to publish the latest industry news and articles and garner a loyal readership. If you work diligently, you will start generating thousands unique visitors a day through Google News alone. In turn, this will open up advertising opportunities on your website and help cover some of the initial cost of setting up your site, create resources for improvement and even generate income for your business. And that’s always a worthwhile endeavor.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Facebook's Network Effect
Was it only two and a half years ago that MySpace seemed completely unbeatable? The combination of inexpensive content development and a huge audience seemed like the path to riches, or a least a new content development format. According to the numbers, MySpace is clearly still the dominant player in the space:
Why all the buzz about Facebook then? There is not a single stat in the chart above that would suggest Facebook is a market leader. However, when you look at Facebook’s growth over the past year, there does seem to be solid audience growth:
Now, let’s focus in on the last couple of months. Since April, when Facebook basically opened up the doors to everyone, their traffic has grown from 22 million unique visitors to almost 35 million unique visitors. During this time, MySpace has stayed relatively flat. This is interesting, but not altogether shocking. The growth of audience isn’t what I find interesting, what’s interesting is the Time Per Person:
Facebook is a living demonstration of the Network Effect; as the audience has increased, so has the usage on a per person basis. This is a remarkably difficult thing for a site to do. As most sites pick up more traffic, they sacrifice engagement by watering down their audience with casual visitors.
How strong is the Network Effect? If you start looking at the time per person and audience starting in April, Facebook data correlates at .95 and MySpace correlates at -.39. This means, roughly, that each additional person added to Facebook increases the incremental time spent (read: value) by any individual person. That, my friends, is the Network Effect in action.
The funny thing is, websites don’t normally act this way - communication outlets, such as email, fax machines and telephones do. Here’s where things get interesting, advertising via communication mechanisms doesn’t work all that well. We all hate spam, cold calls and even those little ads you sometimes get with Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. But Facebook needs to make money, right? So, it would appear that they have a problem.
This leads to the $100 million question (literally in this case) - how do you use the Network Effect to your advantage in an advertising model? Facebook has some new ad formats out there that are interesting attempts; I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Google Chrome Attracts 2 Million Visitors
Nielsen Online, a service of the Nielsen Company, today reported that between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7, 2008, more than 1.9 million unique visitors in the
Nearly 1.4 percent of all
Men dominated traffic to the Chrome “Thank You” page, with males 35-49 accounting for 39 percent
Top News Sites for May 2008
| Brand or Channel | Unique Audience | Time Per Person |
| All Current Events & Global News | 100,417 | 125:42:00 |
| Yahoo! News | 35,846 | 00:22:12 |
| MSNBC Digital Network | 35,184 | 00:29:00 |
| CNN Digital Network | 33,101 | 00:38:48 |
| AOL News | 22,524 | 00:35:27 |
| NYTimes.com | 21,340 | 00:28:52 |
| Tribune Newspapers | 16,238 | 00:08:59 |
| Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division | 14,629 | 00:19:49 |
| Google News | 11,356 | 00:12:28 |
| ABCNEWS Digital Network | 11,124 | 00:09:34 |
| USATODAY.com | 10,785 | 00:13:00 |
| Fox News Digital Network | 10,132 | 00:43:16 |
| CBS News Digital Network | 9,225 | 00:08:00 |
| washingtonpost.com | 9,204 | 00:16:04 |
| McClatchy Newspaper Network | 9,131 | 00:12:41 |
| Hearst Newspapers Digital | 7,955 | 00:17:45 |
| WorldNow | 7,523 | 00:17:55 |
| MediaNews Group Newspapers | 6,965 | 00:12:13 |
| Slate | 6,456 | 00:07:37 |
| Advance Internet | 6,202 | 00:14:27 |
| IB Websites | 5,943 | 00:13:38 |
| BBC News | 5,933 | 00:09:13 |
| Cox Newspapers | 5,826 | 00:12:58 |
| Belo Television | 5,354 | 00:09:52 |
| Topix | 5,133 | 00:04:40 |
| Boston.com | 4,962 | 00:09:40 |
| Gannett Broadcasting | 4,735 | 00:10:02 |
| TheHuffingtonPost.com | 4,715 | 00:08:50 |
| Associated Press | 4,527 | 00:05:09 |
| Belo Newspapers | 4,462 | 00:09:38 |
| Fox Television Stations | 4,386 | 00:06:22 |
| Daily News Online Edition | 4,331 | 00:06:16 |
| Daily Mail | 4,040 | 00:08:44 |
| New York Post Holdings | 3,966 | 00:08:02 |
| Freedom Interactive Network | 3,749 | 00:05:20 |
| NPR | 3,713 | 00:07:31 |
| Newsmax.com | 3,375 | 00:11:33 |
Wikipedia U.S. Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent in Five Years
Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today announced that four out
of the five top referring Web sites to Wikipedia, which has grown nearly 8,000
percent over the last five years, are search engines, led by Google. In April,
61 percent of visitors from home and 66 percent of visitors from work to
en.wikipedia.org were referred from Google (see Table 1). Yahoo! Search was
the second most common referring site to English-language Wikipedia, referring
19 percent and 16 percent of visitors from home and work, respectively. Other
searchproviders to make the top five referring destinations for Wikipedia were
MSN/Windows Live Search and AOL Search.
Table 1: Top Referring Sudomains for en.wikipedia.org for April 2008 (U.S.)
Subdomain Percent of Subdomain Percent of
Visitors at Home Visitors at Work
www.google.com 61 www.google.com 66
search.yahoo.com 19 search.yahoo.com 16
www.wikipedia.org 11 www.wikipedia.org 9
search.msn.com 5 search.msn.com 6
aolsearch.aol.com 3 search.live.com 4
Source: Nielsen Online
Note: Referral traffic is not unduplicated. Visitors can be referred from
more than one Web site during the month.
"Search providers dominate Wikipedia's referring traffic because of
itsscope and value as an information resource," said Michael Pond, media
analyst,
Nielsen Online. "The site's rapid ascent, with audience levels comparable to
popular brands such as eBay and MySpace, demonstrates the success of its
collaborative nature -- readers can edit entries and add information. This
consumer involvement has led to an increase in blog mentions of Wikipedia,
which builds the site's relevance and credibility."
In the past five years, Web traffic to Wikipedia has skyrocketed, increasing
nearly 8,000 percent from April 2003 to April 2008. Year-over-year growth rates
indicate surges where Wikipedia gained traction in the online marketplace (
Table 2: Web Traffic Growth at Wikipedia (U.S., Home and Work)
April Unique Audience (000) YOY Growth
2003 700 NA
2004 2,082 197%
2005 6,753 224%
2006 25,970 285%
2007 45,934 77%
2008 55,820 17%
Source: Nielsen Online
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Thursday, September 18, 2008
Get Your Website Included in Google News
Here are some basic rules to get listed.
1) Original Content: Simply reproducing news from other websites will not work. You need to have original content on your website.
2) Multiple Authors: Simple blogs with good content will not get included in Google News. This is because Google News wants multiple authors to “qualify” a website as a news source.
3) Organizational Structure: Google News includes articles only from sources that could be considered organizations; generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, the availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. Hence, reviewing a website should give evidence of an organization.
This may seem like a very difficult task but below are 10 tips that should help you before submitting your site to Google News.
1) Website Template: Your website should look like a news source. Avoid any template that remotely resembles a blog. The design of your home page is important and should clearly mention which industry your website covers.
2) Content Management System: Your website Content Management System (CMS) should be geared to handle news-type content. Your CMS should have a URL rewrite engine so that it generates flat-search engine friendly URLs — those with keywords, rather than something like “yourwebsite.com/article.asp?=123.?456.” This not only will help in crawling, but also in Google News ranking. Avoid a CMS that generates more than two variables in the URLas it can create crawling problems.
3) Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).
4) About Us and Contact Pages: Make these pages prominent on your website and one click away from the home page. A “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. You should also have a URL that is a directory of contributors and provide names of all your authors and editors, preferably with their email addresses. Try to give more information about your company and what it does in the “About Us” page.
5) Article Format: Each article format should include a title, author name, publication date and time (optional) and a minimum of 250-300 words in the article body.
6) Article Title: Set the title tag on the HTML page to the title of the article. The title should be displayed prominently above the text of the article. Avoid hyperlinks in the title. Title length should be 2-22 words. However, try to avoid very long or very short titles. If you are covering some big publicly-listed companies, include their name in the title. This will help your article appear if anyone is tracking those companies, either in Google News or through their email alert service.
7) Number of Articles: Chances are, a website with 10 total articles applying to be included in Google News will be rejected outright — it doesn’t give the impression of authority or heavy activity. Therefore, I recommend that you have at least 100 articles before you even think of completing the application form.
8) Article Frequency: Try to add at least three new articles every day. The more new articles you add the better, because once an article loses its “News” value, it will stop getting visitors from Google News.
9) Images and Video: As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Having a few images will make your news site stand out. And the same goes with videos. However, articles that are solely images and/or videos will not be included in Google News.
10) Advertising: Avoid too little or over-the-top advertising. Too little means your website does not attract enough visitors, whereas too much advertising might make one question your motive in getting your website listed with Google News.
Once you have covered these 10 points, apply for Google News inclusion. You will be asked to provide your site location information (City, State/Province, Country) and contact information URL and a URL that lists a directory of contributors. You can also select what topic(s) your site covers on this page. The Google News team will then respond to your request, generally within a few days to a week’s time. If your website is rejected, don’t give up. Many times, the Google News team
gives a reason for not including your website. Correct the oversight(s) and reapply.
Once you get an inclusion confirmation you can check which articles were crawled by using this command in Google News — Source: Website name. If your website contains paid content, use the “First click free” concept. Configure your Web servers to not serve the registration page to Google crawlers, identified as “User Agent — Googlebot.” You can configure this in a way so that the first article view by a Google News user doesn’t require a subscription. But all other links on this article page are trapped, which means if the user clicks anywhere else on the page, then they will be prompted to sign up.
After getting listed with Google News, your priorities should be ensuring trouble-free running of your website and adding the latest news to attract traffic. Below are some general tips which should help:
1) Webmaster Tools: Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools for News. It’s very useful in trouble-shooting your news website.
2) Hosting: This will help smooth crawling for the Google News bot. And if your article hits the first few spots in Google News for an important keyword, you will likely see some serious traffic which will need stable hosting. If there are any problems with hosting, you will see indicators in webmaster tools — errors in crawling or other problems.
3) Article Updates: Avoid article updates, because currently Google News crawls each article URL only once. Hence any update to an article after Google News has crawled it will not be reflected on Google News.
4) Google News Sitemap: Creating a Google News Sitemap will not affect your rankings. But having a Sitemap gives you more control by informing Google News which articles specifically to crawl. Sitemaps also allow you specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date or keywords that help determine where your article belongs in Google News.
5) Feeds: Have RSS feeds for your news so that your visitors can subscribe. Use Feedburner to create feeds that are compatible with the most popular feed readers. Have a button on your home page where readers can click to subscribe to your feeds.
6) Content Ideas: Subscribing to press release distribution feeds will help you get the latest information coming out of your industry. You can create a journalist login with PRNewsWire, BusinessWire, MarketWire or PRWeb and set your preferences for receiving press releases. These releases can give you ideas or certain figures to help you create unique news articles. Apart from these, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds from industry websites or set email alerts for some industry keywords on Google News.
Google News is not the only player in the game, but it is the largest and most likely to send you hordes of visitors. Listed below are two other websites where you can submit your news site:
1) Yahoo News: Apply for Yahoo News inclusion at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/forms/submitsource.html.
2) Topix.net: Find relevant news categories at http://www.topix.net/ then click the Feedback button at the bottom of the page. On this page, under “Are we missing a news source?” you will find a link to submit your site.
The aim for your news website should be to publish the latest industry news and articles and garner a loyal readership. If you work diligently, you will start generating thousands unique visitors a day through Google News alone. In turn, this will open up advertising opportunities on your website and help cover some of the initial cost of setting up your site, create resources for improvement and even generate income for your business. And that’s always a worthwhile endeavor.
1) Original Content: Simply reproducing news from other websites will not work. You need to have original content on your website.
2) Multiple Authors: Simple blogs with good content will not get included in Google News. This is because Google News wants multiple authors to “qualify” a website as a news source.
3) Organizational Structure: Google News includes articles only from sources that could be considered organizations; generally characterized by multiple writers and editors, the availability of organizational information, and accessible contact information. Hence, reviewing a website should give evidence of an organization.
This may seem like a very difficult task but below are 10 tips that should help you before submitting your site to Google News.
1) Website Template: Your website should look like a news source. Avoid any template that remotely resembles a blog. The design of your home page is important and should clearly mention which industry your website covers.
2) Content Management System: Your website Content Management System (CMS) should be geared to handle news-type content. Your CMS should have a URL rewrite engine so that it generates flat-search engine friendly URLs — those with keywords, rather than something like “yourwebsite.com/article.asp?=123.?456.” This not only will help in crawling, but also in Google News ranking. Avoid a CMS that generates more than two variables in the URLas it can create crawling problems.
3) Article URL: Each article URL should be unique and contain a unique number consisting of at least three digits. The Google News crawler cannot index an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news01.html. It can, however, crawl an article with this URL: http://www.website.com/news001.html. Google News cannot crawl an article URL with four digits, which resembles a year (http://www.website.com/news2008.html).
4) About Us and Contact Pages: Make these pages prominent on your website and one click away from the home page. A “Contact” page should have your organization’s name and contact information. You should also have a URL that is a directory of contributors and provide names of all your authors and editors, preferably with their email addresses. Try to give more information about your company and what it does in the “About Us” page.
5) Article Format: Each article format should include a title, author name, publication date and time (optional) and a minimum of 250-300 words in the article body.
6) Article Title: Set the title tag on the HTML page to the title of the article. The title should be displayed prominently above the text of the article. Avoid hyperlinks in the title. Title length should be 2-22 words. However, try to avoid very long or very short titles. If you are covering some big publicly-listed companies, include their name in the title. This will help your article appear if anyone is tracking those companies, either in Google News or through their email alert service.
7) Number of Articles: Chances are, a website with 10 total articles applying to be included in Google News will be rejected outright — it doesn’t give the impression of authority or heavy activity. Therefore, I recommend that you have at least 100 articles before you even think of completing the application form.
8) Article Frequency: Try to add at least three new articles every day. The more new articles you add the better, because once an article loses its “News” value, it will stop getting visitors from Google News.
9) Images and Video: As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Having a few images will make your news site stand out. And the same goes with videos. However, articles that are solely images and/or videos will not be included in Google News.
10) Advertising: Avoid too little or over-the-top advertising. Too little means your website does not attract enough visitors, whereas too much advertising might make one question your motive in getting your website listed with Google News.
Once you have covered these 10 points, apply for Google News inclusion. You will be asked to provide your site location information (City, State/Province, Country) and contact information URL and a URL that lists a directory of contributors. You can also select what topic(s) your site covers on this page. The Google News team will then respond to your request, generally within a few days to a week’s time. If your website is rejected, don’t give up. Many times, the Google News team
gives a reason for not including your website. Correct the oversight(s) and reapply.
Once you get an inclusion confirmation you can check which articles were crawled by using this command in Google News — Source: Website name. If your website contains paid content, use the “First click free” concept. Configure your Web servers to not serve the registration page to Google crawlers, identified as “User Agent — Googlebot.” You can configure this in a way so that the first article view by a Google News user doesn’t require a subscription. But all other links on this article page are trapped, which means if the user clicks anywhere else on the page, then they will be prompted to sign up.
After getting listed with Google News, your priorities should be ensuring trouble-free running of your website and adding the latest news to attract traffic. Below are some general tips which should help:
1) Webmaster Tools: Create an account with Google Webmaster Tools for News. It’s very useful in trouble-shooting your news website.
2) Hosting: This will help smooth crawling for the Google News bot. And if your article hits the first few spots in Google News for an important keyword, you will likely see some serious traffic which will need stable hosting. If there are any problems with hosting, you will see indicators in webmaster tools — errors in crawling or other problems.
3) Article Updates: Avoid article updates, because currently Google News crawls each article URL only once. Hence any update to an article after Google News has crawled it will not be reflected on Google News.
4) Google News Sitemap: Creating a Google News Sitemap will not affect your rankings. But having a Sitemap gives you more control by informing Google News which articles specifically to crawl. Sitemaps also allow you specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date or keywords that help determine where your article belongs in Google News.
5) Feeds: Have RSS feeds for your news so that your visitors can subscribe. Use Feedburner to create feeds that are compatible with the most popular feed readers. Have a button on your home page where readers can click to subscribe to your feeds.
6) Content Ideas: Subscribing to press release distribution feeds will help you get the latest information coming out of your industry. You can create a journalist login with PRNewsWire, BusinessWire, MarketWire or PRWeb and set your preferences for receiving press releases. These releases can give you ideas or certain figures to help you create unique news articles. Apart from these, you can also subscribe to RSS feeds from industry websites or set email alerts for some industry keywords on Google News.
Google News is not the only player in the game, but it is the largest and most likely to send you hordes of visitors. Listed below are two other websites where you can submit your news site:
1) Yahoo News: Apply for Yahoo News inclusion at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/news/forms/submitsource.html.
2) Topix.net: Find relevant news categories at http://www.topix.net/ then click the Feedback button at the bottom of the page. On this page, under “Are we missing a news source?” you will find a link to submit your site.
The aim for your news website should be to publish the latest industry news and articles and garner a loyal readership. If you work diligently, you will start generating thousands unique visitors a day through Google News alone. In turn, this will open up advertising opportunities on your website and help cover some of the initial cost of setting up your site, create resources for improvement and even generate income for your business. And that’s always a worthwhile endeavor.
Facebook's Network Effect
Was it only two and a half years ago that MySpace seemed completely unbeatable? The combination of inexpensive content development and a huge audience seemed like the path to riches, or a least a new content development format. According to the numbers, MySpace is clearly still the dominant player in the space:
Why all the buzz about Facebook then? There is not a single stat in the chart above that would suggest Facebook is a market leader. However, when you look at Facebook’s growth over the past year, there does seem to be solid audience growth:
Now, let’s focus in on the last couple of months. Since April, when Facebook basically opened up the doors to everyone, their traffic has grown from 22 million unique visitors to almost 35 million unique visitors. During this time, MySpace has stayed relatively flat. This is interesting, but not altogether shocking. The growth of audience isn’t what I find interesting, what’s interesting is the Time Per Person:
Facebook is a living demonstration of the Network Effect; as the audience has increased, so has the usage on a per person basis. This is a remarkably difficult thing for a site to do. As most sites pick up more traffic, they sacrifice engagement by watering down their audience with casual visitors.
How strong is the Network Effect? If you start looking at the time per person and audience starting in April, Facebook data correlates at .95 and MySpace correlates at -.39. This means, roughly, that each additional person added to Facebook increases the incremental time spent (read: value) by any individual person. That, my friends, is the Network Effect in action.
The funny thing is, websites don’t normally act this way - communication outlets, such as email, fax machines and telephones do. Here’s where things get interesting, advertising via communication mechanisms doesn’t work all that well. We all hate spam, cold calls and even those little ads you sometimes get with Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. But Facebook needs to make money, right? So, it would appear that they have a problem.
This leads to the $100 million question (literally in this case) - how do you use the Network Effect to your advantage in an advertising model? Facebook has some new ad formats out there that are interesting attempts; I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
Google Chrome Attracts 2 Million Visitors
Nielsen Online, a service of the Nielsen Company, today reported that between Sept. 1 and Sept. 7, 2008, more than 1.9 million unique visitors in the
Nearly 1.4 percent of all
Men dominated traffic to the Chrome “Thank You” page, with males 35-49 accounting for 39 percent
Top News Sites for May 2008
| Brand or Channel | Unique Audience | Time Per Person |
| All Current Events & Global News | 100,417 | 125:42:00 |
| Yahoo! News | 35,846 | 00:22:12 |
| MSNBC Digital Network | 35,184 | 00:29:00 |
| CNN Digital Network | 33,101 | 00:38:48 |
| AOL News | 22,524 | 00:35:27 |
| NYTimes.com | 21,340 | 00:28:52 |
| Tribune Newspapers | 16,238 | 00:08:59 |
| Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division | 14,629 | 00:19:49 |
| Google News | 11,356 | 00:12:28 |
| ABCNEWS Digital Network | 11,124 | 00:09:34 |
| USATODAY.com | 10,785 | 00:13:00 |
| Fox News Digital Network | 10,132 | 00:43:16 |
| CBS News Digital Network | 9,225 | 00:08:00 |
| washingtonpost.com | 9,204 | 00:16:04 |
| McClatchy Newspaper Network | 9,131 | 00:12:41 |
| Hearst Newspapers Digital | 7,955 | 00:17:45 |
| WorldNow | 7,523 | 00:17:55 |
| MediaNews Group Newspapers | 6,965 | 00:12:13 |
| Slate | 6,456 | 00:07:37 |
| Advance Internet | 6,202 | 00:14:27 |
| IB Websites | 5,943 | 00:13:38 |
| BBC News | 5,933 | 00:09:13 |
| Cox Newspapers | 5,826 | 00:12:58 |
| Belo Television | 5,354 | 00:09:52 |
| Topix | 5,133 | 00:04:40 |
| Boston.com | 4,962 | 00:09:40 |
| Gannett Broadcasting | 4,735 | 00:10:02 |
| TheHuffingtonPost.com | 4,715 | 00:08:50 |
| Associated Press | 4,527 | 00:05:09 |
| Belo Newspapers | 4,462 | 00:09:38 |
| Fox Television Stations | 4,386 | 00:06:22 |
| Daily News Online Edition | 4,331 | 00:06:16 |
| Daily Mail | 4,040 | 00:08:44 |
| New York Post Holdings | 3,966 | 00:08:02 |
| Freedom Interactive Network | 3,749 | 00:05:20 |
| NPR | 3,713 | 00:07:31 |
| Newsmax.com | 3,375 | 00:11:33 |
Wikipedia U.S. Web Traffic Grows 8,000 Percent in Five Years
Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, today announced that four out
of the five top referring Web sites to Wikipedia, which has grown nearly 8,000
percent over the last five years, are search engines, led by Google. In April,
61 percent of visitors from home and 66 percent of visitors from work to
en.wikipedia.org were referred from Google (see Table 1). Yahoo! Search was
the second most common referring site to English-language Wikipedia, referring
19 percent and 16 percent of visitors from home and work, respectively. Other
searchproviders to make the top five referring destinations for Wikipedia were
MSN/Windows Live Search and AOL Search.
Table 1: Top Referring Sudomains for en.wikipedia.org for April 2008 (U.S.)
Subdomain Percent of Subdomain Percent of
Visitors at Home Visitors at Work
www.google.com 61 www.google.com 66
search.yahoo.com 19 search.yahoo.com 16
www.wikipedia.org 11 www.wikipedia.org 9
search.msn.com 5 search.msn.com 6
aolsearch.aol.com 3 search.live.com 4
Source: Nielsen Online
Note: Referral traffic is not unduplicated. Visitors can be referred from
more than one Web site during the month.
"Search providers dominate Wikipedia's referring traffic because of
itsscope and value as an information resource," said Michael Pond, media
analyst,
Nielsen Online. "The site's rapid ascent, with audience levels comparable to
popular brands such as eBay and MySpace, demonstrates the success of its
collaborative nature -- readers can edit entries and add information. This
consumer involvement has led to an increase in blog mentions of Wikipedia,
which builds the site's relevance and credibility."
In the past five years, Web traffic to Wikipedia has skyrocketed, increasing
nearly 8,000 percent from April 2003 to April 2008. Year-over-year growth rates
indicate surges where Wikipedia gained traction in the online marketplace (
Table 2: Web Traffic Growth at Wikipedia (U.S., Home and Work)
April Unique Audience (000) YOY Growth
2003 700 NA
2004 2,082 197%
2005 6,753 224%
2006 25,970 285%
2007 45,934 77%
2008 55,820 17%
Source: Nielsen Online
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