Slideshows at NYTimes.com account for an amazing 10 percent of all traffic to the site, according to its general manager, Vivian Schiller.
Is it just me, or is that an insane amount of traffic? Schiller divulged this trivia while bragging about NYTimes.com’s online-only content during an interview with Jon Friedman of Marketwatch:
"The whole marketing campaign stems from how people don't think of us only as an online newspaper," Schiller said. "You don't know what's going to stick. Slide shows have taken off like a rocket, accounting for 10% of our page views in August. Our strategy is to unleash the creativity of our journalists to tell their stories and build communities around areas of interest."While the Times failed to give more specific statistics about the success of the slide shows, Schiller noted: "What it says to me is that you can figure out a compelling way to deliver news and information to the readers. What do we do next? We do more of them."
I’ll agree that users favor audio slideshows, but I never anticipated they could account for 10 percent of total traffic. That’s on par with our entire job listings section, for example. What’s the secret to success?
Comments (4)
Do you reckon they count every image displayed as a page view? Huge numbers either way, but perhaps it makes a tad bit more sense if each audio slideshow generate several page views.
Posted by Eirik Wallem Fossan | October 4, 2007 2:59 AM
Posted on October 4, 2007 02:59
Just judging from the example slideshow linked above, which has a unique URL for every photo, I'd say they're counting every photo as a page view.
They're certainly not the only site in the world to do that. Still, 10 percent is huge.
I do think their slideshow player puts a particular emphasis on making it easy to share the slideshow with others and to find related slideshows. That might help, as well.
Posted by Lucas | October 4, 2007 5:57 AM
Posted on October 4, 2007 05:57
Interesting. I've followed a few debates on how to count Ajax / Flash content. A repeating point is that page views should only be counted as such when the whole page and its ads are refreshed. Others argue that when the "main content" of a page is changed (i.e. an image in a gallery) it constitutes a page view.
But perhaps the focus should rather be on session time (stickiness). No doubt audio slideshows contribute to that metric as well.
Btw, their slideshow player looks like an upgraded version of Soundslides(?).
Posted by Eirik Wallem Fossan | October 5, 2007 4:31 AM
Posted on October 5, 2007 04:31
NY Times calls all their photo galleries Slide Shows regardless of whether there's audio or not... and as the earlier poster said they do seem to be counting individual page views.
Her claim of 10 percent seems a lot more plausible that way.
Posted by Rob | October 20, 2007 1:48 PM
Posted on October 20, 2007 13:48