Why Page Views Can Be a Misleading Metric for Newsrooms

When it comes to measuring the success of a website or online content, many people turn to page views as an indicator of popularity. After all, the more page views a website or piece of content has, the more people must be interested in it, right? Well, not necessarily.

While page views can certainly be a useful metric, they can also be misleading. For one thing, page views don't necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the content on the page. A website or piece of content could have a high number of page views simply because it's been heavily promoted, but that doesn't mean that people are actually engaging with the content once they arrive on the page. The most telling metric for reader retention is actually reader regularity, which simply means: Does the same person come back and read over and over again? Is there a consistent number of readers per article? 

A study conducted with the cooperation of over 100 outlets actually found that increases in pageviews and time spent on the page may actually have a negative impact on subscribers and revenues—the opposite of what newsrooms thought. “This was a stunning finding for us, and first I didn’t believe it,” said Edward Malthouse, research director of the Medill IMC Spiegel Research Center. “But then we started to unpack it.” 

Part of the problem is that page views can be easily inflated. For example, if a website uses a technique called "clickbait" to entice people to click through to a page, that page may receive a high number of page views even if the content itself is of low quality or irrelevant to the reader's interests. Clickbait can lead to binging news as well, which Larry DeGaris, executive director of the Spiegel Research Center, says is bad for subscriber retention. “We need to focus on subscriptions, and then we need to understand what drives retention: what gets people subscribed and keeps them there…Not only is the finding that it’s regularity that drives retention and reduces churn, but the pageviews and time spent can have a negative influence when you control for regularity.”

Also, page views can be manipulated by bots or other automated processes, which can make it difficult to determine how many of the page views are actually from real people. This is called “bot traffic,” and can be particularly damaging for news sources that rely on ad revenue, who may be paying based on the number of page views their ads receive.

So what other metrics can be helpful, instead of page views? There are a variety of other metrics that can give you a better idea of the success of your website or content. For example, you might look at metrics like bounce rate (the percentage of people who leave your site after only viewing one page), time on page (how long people stay on your pages), or engagement rate (how often people are interacting with your content).

Ultimately, the key is to not rely too heavily on any one metric. Instead, use a combination of metrics to get a more comprehensive view of how your website or content is performing, and what content is attracting or repelling new subscribers. And remember, page views can be useful, but they can also be misleading, so always take them with a grain of salt.