November 11, 1999
Online Journalists Keep Their Eyes on Daily Numbers
By RICK MARIN

Old-media journalists measure their mettle in scoops and Pulitzers. New-media reporters and editors have another gauge of success or failure: hits.
By counting the hits or, more accurately, page views, on their Web sites, online magazines like Salon, Slate and The Industry Standard can track not only how many people are reading them but also for how long people are reading any given article. In a business that has never quite been able to nail down the habits of that elusive consumer -- the reader -- no old-fashioned focus group can match the hard binary data of the Internet.
And for ink-stained wretches -- now repetitive-stress-injured wretches -- who are already prone to a certain amount of professional neurosis, a little knowledge may be a dangerous thing.
"It was utterly shocking coming from a newspaper with a 700,000 circulation," said Joshua Quittner, who had been a technology columnist at Newsday before starting a Web site called The Netly News for Time-Warner in 1995. "Because I had the feeling that when I wrote a story in the newspaper, 700,000 people read it. Which was, of course, untrue. On a Web site, not only do you know how many people are really reading your stuff every week, so do your editors."
Even more "horrific," added Quittner, who is now managing editor of Time Digital, a print supplement to Time magazine, is the fact that "it's not uncommon for people to spend something on the order of 20 seconds on a page."
Not quite the mind-meld of reader and writer that journalists fantasize about when tapping out their deathless prose. But that only makes hit statistics more addictive. Like authors who check their books' Amazon.com rankings on an hourly basis, editors and writers at Salon receive a daily count -- the equivalent of overnight ratings in television.
"We devour them avidly," said Gary Kamiya, Salon's executive editor. "It's become an addiction, actually. One of the things I look forward to is calling them up and seeing how we did."
Craig Offman, a correspondent in Salon's New York office, said of the routine, "Basically, you get a morning tally and you check it immediately." And as in the world of television, this ratings tally has equal power to elate and deflate.
Being near the top of the list -- say, 20,000 hits for a Salon cover article -- is a validating high. Appearing at or near the bottom of the list -- 2,000 to 3,000 hits -- can have the opposite effect. "It's like in high school and you've auditioned for the school play," Offman said. "You look at the cast list and your eyes just slowly move down."
Predictably, what scores big numbers is not lengthy exegeses on foreign policy. It's sex, incendiary opinion columns and almost anything about the Internet. Articles concerning Linux software benefit from what is known as the Slashdot effect. Slashdot is a Web site favored by Linux enthusiasts that provides links to Linux mentions all over Web. So if Salon or The Industry Standard runs an article on Linux, the links automatically increase hits. Obsessive "Blair Witch Project" linkers have the same effect.
Mark Gimein, who covers technology for Salon, knows the pain of ratings anxiety. "Sometimes you see a story of yours did really poorly and then you think, 'What went wrong?' " he said. "You think, 'Gee, why are people reading the slapdash commentary I pulled together in an hour over this great story that I took 23 weeks to report?' "
This summer, Salon ran an article studying the behavior of teenage girls online. It was an analytical, not particularly sexy article, but the headline included a reference to oral sex and readership was correspondingly high. Also this summer, Salon announced that it was giving a prostitute her own column.
Tactics to increase circulation are hardly new to the newspaper trade. And magazines routinely base editorial decisions on expected newsstand sales. But some keepers of journalistic ethics worry that the instantaneous reader surveys will bend online magazines to the mercenary will of their business sides and encourage pandering to sex-obsessed technogeeks.
"It's a publisher's dream and a journalist's nightmare," observed James Poniewozik, formerly Salon's media critic and now television critic at Time. James Ledbetter, a media critic for The Village Voice before he became New York bureau chief of The Industry Standard, said that "when the investment bankers and shareholders are breathing down your neck to maximize traffic," online magazines inevitably became obsessed with hits.
"If you put sex in the headline, you're guaranteed twice the number of hits," Ledbetter continued. "If you put oral sex in the headline, you're guaranteed the highest possible returns. So what you have measured is that people will click on the term 'oral sex,' and that's not journalism."
Kamiya acknowledged that Salon happily gratified its readers' taste for lurid headlines and "libido-tweaking" material, "within reason and where appropriate." But he said the magazine did not shy away from far less sexy book reviews, foreign news or dry political articles. Advertisers are looking for "lots of eyeballs," he said, but "advertising doesn't dictate any of our editorial policy."
Asked if pressure was put on Salon writers by their editors to deliver those eyeballs, Kamiya said, "We've joked about having page views connected to cubicle sizes."
Michael Kinsley, editor of Salon's higher-brow competitor, Slate, called the ability to count page views "insidious." He looks at the numbers out of "malicious curiosity," he said, but does not share them with his staff because, he added, "writers are delicate flowers." Nor does he believe that the numbers have any real value.
"The traffic that goes to one particular article may or may not reveal how important that article is to you or your readers," he said. "The click rate doesn't measure the intensity of somebody's interest." He drew an analogy to his days as editor of Harper's magazine: "We had a crossword puzzle. Only 5 percent of the readers went to the puzzle, but for that 5 percent, it was the reason they got the magazine."
All kinds of tricks are used to measure traffic on the Web. Salon lays out its articles with plenty of blank space, so the reader has to click through three or four pages to get to the end. Each click is measured as a page view. Slate articles, on the other hand, are designed in a continuous scroll -- a single page view. The Time Digital Web site also adds up "unique users," Quittner said. A person who goes to the site and reads 27 articles still counts as only one user.
Quittner recalled fondly the "golden days" of Web-based journalism when he and his young staff at The Netly News, which became the Time Digital site last year, would lure readers by any means necessary.
One enterprising Netly employee set up a fake Web site purporting to be the world's biggest collection of links to pornography sites. Users would click on a link to Tokyo Topless and get a Netly article on the news of the day instead. "For a couple of months the page views went through the roof," Quittner recalled. "And a lot of those people ended up being some of our most loyal readers."

Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company