Are Americans Surfing More Because They’re Working Less?
File under "not quite sure what to make of this": Americans lost 600,000 jobs last month. And a wide variety of Web site operators tell me they’ve seen eye-popping traffic numbers last month. Anyone want to connect the dots?
First, some data points:
Is any of that meaningful? Hard to say: Any single site can argue that they’ve done something to generate more visits and engagement from their users: MySpace has its MySpace Music site, Twitter is the buzziest startup of the last 12 months, etc.
And last month also happened to feature Barack Obama’s inauguration, which was a huge Web traffic driver.
Still… there aren’t that many more Americans who are getting online for the first time at this point. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that the reason a wide variety of sites are posting big traffic gains is because many of us are now unemployed or underemployed? And that we’ve got more a lot of downtime to surf and click?
Alas, all those eyeballs aren’t translating to dollars for many of these publishers: Just ask Time Warner’s AOL (TWX), which saw page views increase 69% during the last three months of 2008, but saw ad revenue drop 18%.
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