Value in traffic from Google questioned

Santiago de la Mora, head of print content partnerships for Google News in Europe, cited the massive traffic figure - one billion click-throughs from Google News per month. But Matt Kelly, associate editor of the Daily Mirror and Mirror.co.uk, questions its value.

“Some of our competitors have 30 million unique users a month, and you would think that any business that has 30 million unique users would be the happiest in the world. But they're not. They're worried,” Kelly said.

Users have been trained by Google and by the “cheap worthless technological news solutions out there” to graze many different websites for content with no value going back to the creator of that content. “Often they have no idea which website provided the information they found interesting.” And, as a consequence, advertisers are not interested because there is no real audience in the traditional sense.

But Kelly doesn't blame Google for what he calls “parasitic consumption.”

“We are the ones who are to blame, for allowing ourselves to be talked into letting search engine optimisation become the be-all and end-all of website design, for the short-term bragging rights of monthly unique visitors, an absurd metric that values one random visit from one random Google News visitor,” he said.

If such practices continue, content value will continue to erode, he says. He recommends going back to creating traditional, loyal audiences. “Concentrate on what is unique and special about our content and worry less about disseminating it to the widest possible audience.”

Kelly was speaking in a session on paid content versus free content on the web. Read more from the session, and from other conference presentations, on the Editors Weblog, http://editorsweblog.org.