In fact, on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com’s traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are “new” users who haven’t visited the domain in the last 30 days. Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

This is less than I expected. There’s another way of looking at this: WSJ has a sufficiently strong brand that only 25% of its visitors come from Google. And those visitors tend to be “bad” visitors in that they’re “new”. I’m guessing that WSJ has a very strong core group of users who visit WSJ.com directly multiple times per day. Those readers are infinitely more valuable than the readers who come in through Google ever day.

Rupert may be right. If I were running WSJ I would seriously consider restricting outside access to the site even further. Maybe not to the extent of blocking Google, but certainly to some extent. WSJ may be one of the (few) brands this makes sense for.

1 note | | Nov 10, 2009
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