Take a look at this snapshot i took out of compete.com today (full image here)
This shows, quite interestingly , that dawn.com has nearly double the unique visitors of other news sites..and given that many of dawn.com readers are out of Pakistan, this would also point to a possibility that these guys are way ahead thanks to the good ol’ straight html version. This does not cover RSS but I would think most readers hit the website straight away. Now lets say, for argument’s sake, 50 k daily users out of the 80k unique visitors are in Pakistan. According to published stats, there are 12 million internet users in Pakistan. So out of 12 million, only about 50,000 view the dawn site on a regular basis? huh?
So Whats not right, the published stats , or compete.com ?
Popularity: 25% [?]
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November 11th, 2008 at 8:40 am
Can you run dawn.com versus geo.tv ?
Here is the official word from Dawn.com marketing team (this is about 10 month old). It seems they are telling the truth on daily visitor number. Note the percent split by nationality.
http://www.dawn.com gets on an average 85,000 daily visitors, around 5 million hits daily and 16 million Pageviews with 40% of its visitors based in US, 10% in Canada, 10% in UK, 20% in Pakistan and 10% rest of the world.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:40 am
i ran geo.tv, its even lower than thenews.com.pk at times! dawn seems to be right, but 20% Pakistan means that out of 12 million, only 16-17,000 daily visitors are from PK….
November 11th, 2008 at 10:34 am
so where’s the anomaly? Compete.com is not exactly totally reliable method but not totally BS either. So, given that statement and my personal experience, I think the figures are pretty much it. I’d say roughly around 80k to 100k is realistic figure as compared with 60-70 portrayed by Compete. Why is this a surprising figure, I don’t understand.
Most people in Pakistan would prefer Jang and its figures are very promising and only slightly lower whereas Dawn draws quite a decent following from ExPats and other nationalities so for me Jang’s the winner with an awfully distasteful website. If you compare total urdu-newspapers’ readership vs. total english-newspapers’ readership, the verdict gets clearer.
Both language and style are to be held responsible for such trends alongwith utterly lack of taste, usability and findability features in our websites. I prefer reading Dawn in my mailbox every day and seldom go to the website following any link unless it’s really important to read complete details.
November 11th, 2008 at 10:53 am
see this what I mean: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/jang.com.pk+dawn.com+thenews.com.pk?metric=sess
There’s huge gap between The News visits and Dawn’s but it’s Jang that takes away limelight due to various reasons. It’s safer to say Jang draws more loyal and returning visitors than Dawn by a margin of 100k or so. Again, I don’t take Compete’s words as final but it shows some good guesses.
Dawn offers a very dry and raw user-experience because of its news-reporting and how it offers on the website. Most of the readers of Dawn don’t visit it DAILY unless there’s really pressing need. Dawn (except its beta) doesn’t update its website round the clock as frequently as you’d wish and others deliver.
Overall, I think people are going to demand more if the state-of-affairs at their websites improve. Online traffic has already improved because of positive signs of broadband reach, political instability, crisis over crisis, cheaper connectivity costs and with traditional media slowly but gradually responding to Online World (frequent updates and almost instant updates).
November 11th, 2008 at 11:07 am
btw, According to Google, Jang gets more unique visitors than Dawn. See for yourself:
http://trends.google.com/websites?q=dawn.com%2C+jang.com.pk%2C+thenews.com.pk&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Of course, the news is again down according to google trends which is believable because when it comes to English News, Dawn is the word.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Ejaz, thanks for the additional info, this is great stuff. But if you mark “unique visitors” then the number for Dawn is higher. and most recently jang.com.pk and thenews are essentially almost the same, while dawn is still consistent…hmmm i would love to know why that is. the graph i posted also shows only unique visitors…
November 12th, 2008 at 12:22 am
Compete.com only provide visitor data for US based traffic, they have partnerships with ISPs there. So compete is showing no of visitors to Dawn.com from United States.
November 12th, 2008 at 4:55 am
are you sure?
November 12th, 2008 at 6:32 am
segmenting Unique Visitors in a month and No. of visits shows interesting results. Dawn DOES draw more unique visitors but it fails to draw subsequent and more visits by these visitors. Dawn’s no. of pages per visit also have come down: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/jang.com.pk+dawn.com+thenews.com.pk/?metric=sess
Also, Jang and “The News” links are two separate URLs this is where I suspect “The News” demographics would actually be more because Jang has a subdomain for thenews which would minus the overall demographics for The News website. I don’t know why would they keep a separate subdomain elsewhere and a unique domain name at the same time even if it’s a parked-domain. Just heck of loss-of things.
November 12th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Yup, I agree. I would also work off a single domain with subdomains, like dawn.
December 5th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
I agree with Aly. Alexa, Compete and alike sites mostly aggregate US-based data from different sources. In addition, Alexa heavily aggregate data from their “toolbars”. They *do not* represent traffic from Pakistan and They might be a bit misleading as such.
COMPETE Website:
“Compete triangulates multiple data sources, including ISP, Panel & Toolbar to estimate U.S. traffic.”
ALEXA Website:
“.. This information comes from the community of Alexa Toolbar users..”