Why The New York Times Should Listen to Me
A month ago I scolded the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for not listening to me or to you. Yesterday, just after midnight I blogged a snarky post entitled: New York Times Has Own Futurist — Big Deal. Then after a good night’s sleep I woke and turned to an Editor & Publisher article entitled: NYTimes.com Most Popular Newspaper Site . It says in part:
NYTimes.com kept its strong lead in February as the top newspaper Web site, besting competitors across the country in unique audience, page views, and time spent per person on the site, according to Nielsen//NetRatings.
The article adds:
The New York Times site (which has some articles behind the TimesSelect pay wall) attracted a unique audience of 12,960,000 users in February, who combined for 455,527,000 page views.
Of course, my first reaction was, well, Leonard Witt, it might be time to shut up. How dare you, the keeper of the puny PJNet.org website tell Mr. 12,960,000-unique-visitors-a-month how to run its business. It’s humbling, but then I did some math. In March 2007 I had 14,612 unique visitors here. That means my monthly audience is about: .001127 the size of the New York Time audience. At first that seemed minuscule. But in fact it really is not. Another way of approaching this is that The New York Times monthly online audience is approximately 887 times larger than my audience.
Now the Aha! moment: The New York Times has about 1,000 newspaper reporters and editors. That does not include all their other employees. Still they have a readership that is only 887 times greater than mine. So per employee I am kicking online butt. Yeah, they are kicking my butt on page views, but remember it is little me compared to the enormous THEM.
Of course, any reasonable person reading this would say: Wake Up Leonard, You Are NOT The New York Times.
True I am not. At least not singularly, but here is more information. The New York Times is at the top of the bell curve. I am on the long tail. Of the 70 million blogs watched by Technorati, I am ranked, depending on the day, about 35,000. The April 2007 Technorati state of the blogosphere report says there are about 8,000 blogs with between 100 and 1,000 incoming links. The PJNet.org with 110 today is one of them. So if we started to pool the little guys like me from page rank of 20,000 to 40,000 or from the other 8,000 niche folks with 100 to 1000 inbound sources, I am guessing there would be a few New York Times equivalencies in terms of monthly unique audiences. So singularly we are nothing, but collectively we are a force.
That’s my point. The New York Times has one futurist predicting the future. But what would you prefer? Look at the numbers above, take your pick: 70 million? 35,000? 8,000? Each of us is predicting the future by making the future one blog post at a time. My message again: The New York Times’ future isn’t the futurist, it’s you and me.
