Link from Yahoo breaks traffic records at New York Times
Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper. That’s per a memo sent to staffers this morning, which said the Times’ servers withstood the deluge “brilliantly.” (The piece to which Yahoo linked was a Home and Garden profile of a Connecticut home situated alongside a rail line feature on bargain housing in undesirable locales.)
But as we’ve seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue — or, at least, not the copious coin you might expect from traffic at a rate of 7,300 hits per second. That’s because the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors.
Deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman told me over the phone today that they might have been able to wring more revenue from the traffic if Yahoo had linked to an article in the site’s Theater or Small Business sections, where demand is much higher for expensive advertising sold by the Times.
I wrote about this quandary when The Wichita Eagle got a similar bump from the same spot on Yahoo’s homepage but only generated “a few thousand dollars” in ad revenue. There’s no easy solution here, but I still wonder if major publishers like McClatchy, which owns the Eagle, or The New York Times Co. could better prepare for selling ads against traffic spikes. One option might be forming an ad network of news sites expressly for that purpose.
On the other hand, a link from Yahoo, the web’s second-most-popular site, is a unique experience that may be impossible to anticipate. “We get lots of trafffic from Drudge and Huffington Post,” Landman said in our brief conversation, “but under no circumstances do we ever get a spike like this.” An excerpt from the memo by Landman and Denise Warren, general manager of NYTimes.com, is after the jump.
Links from other sites generate traffic to ours. Usually this happens incrementally, a little here, a little there, adding up over time. Every once in awhile, though, it comes with a rush you can almost hear, causing wild traffic spikes at the most unexpected moments.
On Thursday afternoon, Yahoo put a link in the “Featured” box at the top of their home page to this Home and Garden story. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/garden/18houses.html
In an instant, traffic to our site nearly tripled, breaking a couple of records: nearly 7,300 hits per second and 4.9 million page views for the hour in which the spike occurred, then 4.2 million in the following hour. That’s higher than anything we saw during the 2008 election campaigns, when the previous records were set.
It’s at moments like this when our technology is put to the test, along with the developers who build and maintain it. To their great credit, everything worked brilliantly.
UPDATE, June 28, 5:20 p.m.: I fixed my description of the Home and Garden article, which leads with a house next to a rail line but is more generally about nice homes purchased on the cheap by virtue of their unfortunate locations. Thanks to Sarah Maslin Nir, who wrote the piece, for emailing me today with that correction.
Zachary M. Seward | June 26, 2009 | 12:50 p.m.
Tags: ad networks, advertising, Denise Warren, Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Jonathan Landman, links, McClatchy, New York Times, New York Times Co., remnant ads, traffic, traffic spikes, Wichita Eagle, Yahoo
That yahoo – what a vampire! NYT must have been really upset. ;)
Seriously. Google probably sends more traffic on an aggregate basis. But no memos about that. Still, can’t recall the NYT calling it a vampire, lately. Right now, it’s the WSJ banging on Google while the AP takes a little break.
Maybe if the NYT worked a banner trade or had a working relationship with yahoo, they might have put some viable ads on the page…. or someone watched the spike and made a decision for the best customer with a paying ad within the same demographics?
Yahoo is a slight #2 in unique US audience each month, but a clear #1 in engagement as measured by Comscore’s time spent data. Their homepage is a firehose. People assume Yahoo is a has-been, but they are still breaking records.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/31570729/site/14081545
9 million in 2 hours! That’s some serious traffic. I wonder how many clicks a link at the Google homepage would generate.
Zach, what do you mean by this exactly:
“One option might be forming an ad network of news sites expressly for that purpose.”
Would this have to include Yahoo?
I was thinking it would not include Yahoo, Elizabeth, but that’s actually an intriguing idea. I fleshed out the idea a bit more when I wrote about The Wichita Eagle:
“I wonder if McClatchy, owner of the Eagle and 29 other daily newspapers, could take advantage of its own network. Surely, at least once a week, a McClatchy news site experiences unusually heavy traffic. What if the company’s ad servers were agile enough to direct some sort of national — and more lucrative — ad sale to whichever site just hit the front page of Digg?”
That might actually be unrealistic, though: too much advertising inventory for any publisher to sell, even one as large as McClatchy. But if Yahoo were involved, as you suggest, hmmm. What if Yahoo and, say, the Times had a deal where Yahoo served its own ads on the Times website whenever it linked to a Times article? And then they’d share the revenue. I don’t know, just thinking out loud. This might be what Steve was getting at in his comment above.
John Temple, former publisher of the Rocky Mountain News, shared some other thoughts about this post on his own blog, and I left a comment there as well.
And thanks to everyone else for your insights here. Roshan: Google has more traffic than Yahoo but no equivalent to the Yahoo front page, where they link out to other content. So it’s fair to say that placement in Yahoo’s “featured” box is an unrivaled traffic-driver. —Zach
Seems to me the key is to write more flexible contracts with advertisers. Rather than pre-planning according to promised traffic, have advertisers agree ahead of time to pay more/roll out a more elaborate ad if traffic spikes to certain levels. This would be in the interest of both advertisers, who want to pay more precisely for eyeballs (I imagine) and web sites that see fluctuations in traffic.
I don’t see what’s in it for Yahoo, though. Since they consistently have high traffic, they can consistently charge a set ad rate.
I don’t see why a network is necessary here. Seems to me all that’s needed is a single company or individual to facilitate flexible arrangements between at least one advertiser and at least one news site.
Why couldn’t a developer write a line of PHP that calls certain ads if pageviews on a specific story reach a certain point? Advertisers might pay premium rates to be included as one of those ads.
Mais quel serveur aurait tenu une telle charge en France ? Comment en vouloir au New-York Times de ne pas tenir un multiple de sa charge habituelle !