Google now drives more traffic to nytimes.com than links from the nytimes.com
homepage and all emailed articles combined. Alex
Patriquin has the chart; it shows that in September, the top referral source
for nytimes.com was Google, with 4,862,831 referrals. That’s up 43% from a year
ago. Meanwhile, people going to stories from the nytimes.com homepage or by
clicking on a link in an email fell by almost 4% to 3,115,472. As a
result, Google now has a 56% lead over the NYT’s own internally-generated traffic.
I knew that Google
killed TimesSelect, but I had no idea it was this powerful. These
numbers are the final nail in the coffin of WSJ.com’s subscription model, and
if anybody at Pearson has a brain they should kill off FT.com’s
subscription model as well. If you don’t get Google love, you can’t compete.
Simple as that.
(Via Jeff,
of course)