Douglas McIntyre of 24/7 Wall St. and Silicon Alley Insider’s Peter Kafka have been debating the reasons why BusinessWeek has not been able to replicate its offline success in the online world (according to comScore, BusinessWeek.com trails other finance sites, including Forbes, TheStreet, Morningstar, Bloomberg, CNBC, and Reuters, in monthly page views). For those who haven’t been keeping score at home, McIntyre started things off by suggesting that BusinessWeek’s problems stem from a lack of regularly updated content, BW’s failure to use video on its homepage effectively, and overall site usability problems. Kafka, a former Forbes.com employee, thinks that BW’s page views have been decreasing simply because the site doesn’t have significant distribution.
So, who’s right? Well, actually, they both are. Here’s why:
McIntyre points out that BusinessWeek undoubtedly has the staff to develop unique, fresh content on a daily basis, yet many of its top stories are outdated and its most recent headlines have simply been syndicated from the AP. Needless to say, users are not going to return to a site that doesn’t feature original content with any degree of frequency – particularly in a category like finance, in which news is constantly breaking. A lack of unique content also gives bloggers and webmasters little incentive to link to BW’s pages. This leads to a loss of direct traffic, but more important, it impacts the site’s search engine rankings. Without a significant number of third-party links from authoritative sources, a site cannot count on receiving a meaningful volume of traffic from major search engines. It should be noted that this is where site usability becomes a factor as well: AP articles can be found on so many different websites that webmasters often decide which site they’re going to link to based on the user experience it provides. If BusinessWeek’s usability is poor, it cannot count on being linked.
At the same time, some of BusinessWeek’s strongest competitors are affiliated with other well-trafficked sites. In addition to offering tons of unique content, these competitors are often integrated really well into their parent or partner sites. CNNSI, for instance, drives a huge amount of traffic to CNN.com. And CNN.com drives tons of traffic to Fortune. All of the sites in Time Warner’s portfolio benefit from being part of the family. There’s no doubt that many other finance sites that belong to larger parent companies are benefiting in a similar way. BusinessWeek’s parent McGraw-Hill owns almost no online properties – and none of the ones it does own are very popular. This is where Kafka’s lack of distribution theory really makes sense. Yes, BusinessWeek can strike distribution deals with the major portals, but there is a real advantage to being integrated into a broader network of sites.
It’s worth noting that BusinessWeek.com’s Editor-in-Chief, John A. Byrne, responded in a comment to Kafka’s post by stating that the comScore numbers don’t reflect reality – BW’s internal numbers suggest that they had four times as many page views in August than comScore reported. That may be true, in which case, there’s even more upside for the site if it can address each of the shortcomings McIntyre and Kafka have highlighted.
