The Wardman Wire

I’m ready to be hoist by my own petard on this one, as it is an old story - but I haven’t seen it reported anywhere: the Guardian has started publishing a sectional breakdown of its traffic figures.

The Guardian has started breaking its web traffic figures down by the various sections of its website: News, Arts, Blogs, Books, Business, Comment is Free, Education, Environment, Film, Football, Life and Style, Media, Money, Music, Observer, Politics, Science, Society, Sport, Technology, Travel.

So now blogs in each of these niches can start to make some interesting comparisons.

The numbers have been published as part of the advertising offer for the Guardian.

Overall Guardian September Figures

Worldwide Totals

Worldwide Page Impressions: 208,701,946
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 24,186,422

UK Page Impressions: 93,244,526
Worldwide Monthly unique users: 8,972,467

These Worldwide figures are generated from the monthly audit of Guardian logfiles by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (Electronic) .

Detailed Section Totals

Here are the detailed numbers for August and September.

August Detailed Figures.

September Detailed Figures.

This detailed data is generated by Generated by Omniture, who are totally reputable. The data is generated from a Javascript snippet in each page, which means that the figures are (very roughly - my guess would be to allow a tolerance of perhaps +/- 20%) comparable with Google Analytics figures. My detailed comments are below the fold.

Comment

The most interesting comparison with Independent Political Blogs are probably the UK figures for the Comment is Free and the Politics Sections of the Guardian Website, since most UK political blogs have their traffic massively dominated by UK visitors (many draw as much as 80-90% or more of their traffic from the UK - there are very few with significant US traffic).

The traffic profile for these Guardian Sections is broader and shallower than most political blogs. That has implications for potential advertisers, which I will cover in a further article.

What I will add now is that careful correlation of this data with the Guardian Rate Card and Financial Reports would facilitate some quite revealing analysis, for example to compare the potential advertising income of the site with the estimated income.

There are also massive variations between August and September. That is partly due to the Olympics, partly to the summer holidays and Party Conference season, and possibly also due to the new reports bedding in at the Guardian.

This is the current ratecard, which is marked as “Effective from September 2005″. That statement tells its own story of over-optimistic pricing.

Wrapping Up

Next time I’ll make some comparisons using these figures between Guardian advertising and advertising on blogs.