Untangling Year 1 of Our Web
In addition to writing this column, my other duties include overseeing content development for the Los Angeles Times Web site, https://www.latimes.com. This week, we pass our one-year anniversary, and some of the lessons we’ve learned might show something about how well or poorly the Web is doing at making its way into our lives.
This company’s move into electronic publishing has been a roller-coaster ride that began more than 10 years ago. Times Mirror was part of the earliest Videotext experiments. It was a development ahead of its time: There were few personal computers back then, and the use of special terminals to present simple text on a screen was a crude solution that had little popular appeal.
In 1993, The Times, in conjunction with Prodigy Services, launched TimesLink, a subscription-based electronic service that in the course of a year drew more customers than any newspaper online service. When it became clear that the subscriptions would not sustain a business, TimesLink was shut in December 1995.
A year ago, we relaunched our electronic service on the Web, and it has grown quickly and steadily in traffic, in attention and in advertising revenues.
Happily, readers seem amenable to the idea that a newspaper company would be involved online; news, in fact, has emerged as one of the most important and popular uses of this fledgling medium.
Potential advertisers now understand why our sales representatives would approach them to buy space and time on the Web. City halls and nonprofit groups are now open to working with us in developing new means to present their information.
Using the inexact metrics now available for measuring readership, the site is getting about 6 million page impressions a month, about 1.7 million hits a day, a free-to-the-user registration of 160,000-plus.
Our strategy is continually evolving: One of the key lessons so far is that long-range planning lasts for about six weeks at a time, and that business plans need rehatching more often than one could imagine.
My own take on the news business is that what we sell is habit.
If we can convince readers that we are credible, reliable and practical, if we can help guide them through a complicated world, we can be successful. That’s what we do on paper, and that’s what we aim to do online.
Here are some of the things we know about our Web readers:
* Most use the service during the business day. By contrast, our TimesLink readers were more likely to come online in the evening.
* Despite the changing demographics of the Web, more of our readers are men, and they tend to be younger than the average newspaper reader.
* Only half our readers are from California, and about 15% are from overseas.
Here are some of our biggest challenges:
* Updating. There is more and more demand at this newspaper site and others for instant information. Meeting that demand is at best difficult, because newspaper editorial operations are set up for a once-a-day production, and converting them to 24-hour live news outlets would be far more expensive than the Web traffic can justify. Still, efforts are underway here to satisfy the demand for freshness.
* Classified markets. This is a key battleground for newspapers, which want to protect and expand listings for jobs, homes, cars and other goods. Our site will be expanding to 10 categories of classified ads over the next few months.
* Customization. The ability to tailor information to individual readers is one of the Web’s great strengths, and The Times has won plaudits in this area with the Hunter personalized news service. Now we’re trying to figure out how to harness that power for information products that are “pushed” automatically to the reader.
Considering that the first mention of the World Wide Web in The Times was in July 1994, it’s remarkable how quickly all of this has taken place. Although newspapers fall below the search engine directories and a few big media sites like CNN in terms of traffic, The Times and other big papers are among the 30 to 50 busiest Web sites.
That’s not too bad. And personally, I’ve found it a fascinating trip so far. Happy anniversary.
*
Terry Schwadron is editor of Life & Style and oversees latimes.com, The Times’ Web site. He can be reached via e-mail at terry.schwadron@latimes.com
