The impact of web traffic on revenues of traditional newspaper publishers 4 The impact of web traffic on newspaper publishers Newspaper publishers still derive a majority of their online revenues from advertising and therefore their financial results depend on their ability to bring readers to their sites. Even paywall strategies rely on traffic, as bringing more visitors increases the possibility of converting them to paying customers. This study estimates the value of web traffic to websites of newspaper publishers in France, Germany, Spain, and the UK. As illustrated in Box 1, visitors to news publishers’ websites can either access content by navigating directly to the website (“direct traffic”), or can access content through a variety of referral sources which include news aggregators, search engines, social networks and blogs (“referral traffic”). As such, the analysis has looked both to quantify the impact that total web traffic (i.e. both direct and referral traffic) has on publishers’ revenues, along with the impact of referral traffic in isolation. Box 1: Sources of visits Direct (34%) Referrals (66%) Online audience News website Attracting visitors and visits is paramount for news sites funded by advertising. Visits are not the same as visitors because each page they view counts as a separate visit. For example, one visitor may land on a homepage and then read three articles. As a result, the statistics would record he made four visits (one to the homepage, three to article pages). The analysis of comScore data on news sites visits in this study shows that:  34% of visits came from users who navigate to the site directly, either by typing the URL into their address bar or by following their bookmarks.  The remaining 66% of users were referred via other sources. These may include links via search engines, news aggregators or on blogs or social media, which users follow to the news sites. Source: Deloitte analysis of comScore data The results of the analysis are based on historical data. They do not represent incremental revenues and do not seek to measure what would have happened if web referral services did not exist. 4.1 Drivers of traffic There are multiple internal and external factors that drive website traffic. Internally, these may include the quality of content and presentation; externally it may be a brand value, an effective online promotion strategy, or discoverability of content. While a significant portion of publishers’ overall revenues derive from their print operations (see Section 2), online revenues enabled by website traffic are growing in size and importance. The website traffic can come from different sources: visitors can access a page directly, or via other sites such as search engines, news aggregators or through social media. On news sites funded by advertising, visitors are exposed to ads whenever they load a page, which directly translates to revenues for the publisher. Deloitte LLP. 14