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14/04/08 Print Media: 0.0008% Click-Through.
SINGAPORE - On March 14th 2008, this blog was featured in the Irish Times technology section. “I hope my server can handle it”, “My subscriber numbers will rocket!”, “Glad I did my site redesign first!” were all thoughts I did not think.
The Irish Times has a daily circulation of 118,150 Irish adults. Granted a huge percentage probably throw away the Friday technology supplement, lets be conservative and say 99% do this. Leaving my very conservative estimate of 1% (1,181) who do read it. Of that 1%, lets say 20% (236) read it cover to cover and read my piece and saw the URL at the top.
You would think that being featured in the national broadsheet might make a little peak on my stats. As I expected from seeing this before, of course it didn’t…
Using Google Analytics I can deep dive into my logs on that Friday, and see that just 5 people on an Irish internet connection directly (bookmark or typed) visited my site. Of those 5 people, 80% (4) bounced (they looked at the front-page) with an average visit time of 3 seconds. Leaving just 1 person… One person who maybe could have read the Irish Times and noted down my URL for later and gone and bothered to type it in to their browser and bring up this blog. A wonderful 0.0008% click-through rate.
There is no relationship between print readership and click-through rates.
And that is why I have always believed that…
…is a complete and total waste of your money. When advertising to the masses, the print to web click-through does not exist. If you must advertise to the masses, advertise your URL only to people who are connected to the internet at that point in time.
Here’s my rule of print advertising:
“If you show it to enough people, they still won’t visit.”
-Robin
Note: I understand that print editorial and advertising are totally different things. This is only to illustrate the point that don’t think getting your web app or URL into a paper will change your visitor numbers.
(Image Credit: Playing frisbee on the beach at dusk in Koh Tao, Thailand. By Author.)
Tags: clickthrough, irish times, print media, rate
6 Comments
Good writing. Keep up the good work. I just added your RSS feed my Google News Reader..
Matt Hanson
Totally agree Robin. We got a lot of press coverage on our recent funding annoucement and they converted to about 2 new signups. However I think this may change when you have the internet in your pocket and can browse immediately to the site in question.
Roll on the iPhone and similar flat rate devices.
The second thing is to convince print media to put a URL into the copy. Always a tricky one that. Of course then they have to get the URL right. I can sub-editors playing havoc with this process :-(
Joe, I got a demo of some interactive print media in the HP Cooltown Innovation Labs last Thursday over here.
They has this fantastic barcodes (like seen before where you snap with camera phone and brings you to URL) but with these ones it overlayed 3D content on the page you were looking at through the viewfinder. The pages jumped alive, very cool :-)
I’m sure there’s future in this stuff, but its about how to make a reader jump from reading to doing another task without finishing their paper that they intended to sit down & read front to back..
The definitely need something like that to bridge the gap between online and paper mediums.
“If you show it to enough people, they still won’t visit.” great quote - well said
One of the problems with printing URLs is that there’s no way to directly interact with them. Try as hard as you might, you can’t click on a colour supplement.
As you’ve mentioned, QR Codes (2D Barcodes) are one way of bridging this gap. People see the code, snap it and get the site on their phone.
Of course, the problem is building a critical mass of people who know what QR Codes are AND have a reader on their phone.
If you want to demo some QR Code software you can on my site - http://shkspr.mobi/qr.php
