Skiilight Interactive – Seattle Marketing, Web Design, and Graphic Design

Adweek posted an interesting article (with an entirely misleading headline) about Yahoo Sports vs. ESPN in March visitor metrics.

Headline: “Yahoo Sports Slams Foes”

The story: “Yahoo Sports reeled in 14.4 million and 12.7 million weekly uniques during the tournament’s first two weeks (per Nielsen), versus ESPN.com’s 12.8 million and 9.8 million uniques.” (Uniques in this sense are visitors)

The Reality: “John Kosner, ESPN’s senior vp, general manager of digital media, said ESPN.com draws a more passionate fan base, one that visits more regularly and stays longer than Yahoo’s does. Kosner argued that because Yahoo can funnel casual sports fans from its home page and e-mail pages, its audience is less valuable. He points to ESPN’s huge edge in total minutes (216 million versus 144 million in the second week in March) as a truer indicator of engagement. “ESPN.com’s users are consistently more valuable than Yahoo’s,” said Kosner.”

This is a great example of how quality metics and knowing how to interpret them helps you identify your place in the world. Taken at face value it looks as if Yahoo really took ESPN behind the woodshed. However, as John Kosner eloquently explains, the unique visitor metric does not hold as much value as time spent, especially when the total visitors number is as close as theirs are.