Posted by Greg Edwards on February 24 2005
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Is the Washington Post Wasting Money on the Bottom Half of Their Homepage?

Washingtonpost_eyetools_new_homepage_1 My recent analysis of Washington Post's homepage points out that the weak design of the bottom half of their page reduces reading. I received a comment urging me to tie the findings to actual revenue impact, so here goes!

Content costs money for the Washington Post to provide — they have to pay their reporters to generate it, their IT people to put it on the site, and their ISP for bandwidth usage.

If people decide not to read a piece of news because they're not interested, then that's fine. But if potentially-interested people don't see entire sections of content because of a design flaw, then they lose money, and their brand is negatively impacted — it will appear to people that the site offers less content than it actually does, and they will spend less time on the site.

Do they realize they are suffering financially? Probably not... they probably think it's "normal" to have low click-throughs from content below the fold. Just looking at their click logs, they wouldn't be able to realize that potentially-interested people never received the opportunity to click.

Comments

Bud Gibson

http://thecommunityengine.com/

February 24, 2005 at 07:09 AM

Hey, thanks for being so responsive. Based on my broad overview of the publishing industry, where I think this becomes particularly interesting is in ad conversions. If you look at the buzz about why nytimes bought about.com, it was because of their high conversion rates.

Now, is it because about.com has better contextualized ads or because of placement on the page (or some combination)?

Looking at your analysis of the Washington Post site, what people seem not to be looking at are the links to other content on the site. If people are actually scrolling down, as you note in your previous post, people are not ignoring these links because they don't see them, it is just that they recognize what they are seeing as irrelevant links and proceed to spend little time on it. In other words, the content is simply not compelling enough.

So, it seems your device can tell me two things, when content is not being viewed and when it is being viewed but essentially ignored as irrelevant. As a site owner, I know when I am not getting click throughs. I frequently attribute it to poor content. If poor layout is the culprit, I'm likely not to know.

Here's an advertising angle for you. Analyze about.com vs. nytimes.com. Write a headline about why there is the difference in conversion rates (this was reported by John Battelle in his Search Blog at http://battellemedia.com). Publicize that headline and analysis, it will grab attention.

Here's the exact quote from Battelle's site:

"I have seen research reports comparing major search sites to About, and the result is pretty stunning - on average, 10-15% of clicks on search sites are paid. But on About, it's over 20%. That's a pretty big difference."

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Is the Washington Post Wasting Money on the Bottom Half of Their Homepage?

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