Dead Souls
A week ago, I received the results of the latest wave of research Gallup WebIndex, according to which the website Timeout.ru , which we never viewed as a competitor, suddenly showed a fantastic increase in the coverage of the Moscow audience from 430 to 634 thousand visitors per month. This is a 50% increase compared to March. The CEO of Entertime, which manages Timeout.ru , Sergey Klyuchenkov immediately reported success.
Entertime's voiced successes seem significant only to the uninitiated. Sergey's statement is an attempt to either wishful thinking or to mislead investors and advertisers.
Timeout.ru’s own audience has always had a little bit. Up to 80% of visitors to the site both bought and continue to buy from other projects. Let's try to answer three questions:
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In the spring of this year, Timeout.ru closed access to the statistics of its meters on Rambler and Mail.ru. But that part of the statistics , which is impossible to close, gives an exhaustive answer to the first question.
Most visitors came to the site Timeout.ru , to immediately leave him and never return. This is what the monthly frequency says: the average reader of the site looks at 2 pages per month.
For comparison, visitors look at the “ Poster ” on average of 12 pages per month, at “ Afisha@mail.ru ” - 7.5, at “ Yandex.Afishe ” - 7 pages. Even on the St. Petersburg version of Timeout.ru, this figure is 5 - almost three times higher than on the Moscow site.
The second question is: where does such a passive audience come from?
Today to attract traffic on the Russian Internet is easy and inexpensive. On traffic exchanges like RedTram and Novoteka, one transition costs about 3 cents . You can get 600 thousand people a month for 15-20 thousand dollars.
The audience acquired in this way does not show interest in the resource that it hits. It can be safely called untargeted, random. The size of this audience demonstrates not an interest in the topic and product, but a modest budget for attracting cheap traffic. These are the dead souls of the internet.
Writing dead souls in the Coverage column is easy. Moreover, it is extremely seductive. These people were actually on the site in the period under review. Another thing is that they almost immediately closed it.
Discover projects with a significant proportion of dead souls is easy. Their main feature is the low ratio of the number of pages shown per month to the monthly audience (that is, the average number of pages viewed per visitor per month). I will give a few examples.
(Sources: @Mail.ru and Rambler's Top 100 )
And finally, the third question: what does the advertiser get?
The advertiser from the sale of dead souls suffers the most. After all, a brand placed, for example, in the “Cinema” section of Timeout.ru , addresses its advertising message to an audience that goes to the cinema or watches it at home. But people who come to the site in the manner described can have completely different interests:
The return on advertising on such sites is minimal: they are visited by random people who are not interested in the subject of the site. Is it worth the spoiled reputation of immitation of large coverage, everyone decides for himself. According to the owners of such projects - it seems worth it.
Entertime's voiced successes seem significant only to the uninitiated. Sergey's statement is an attempt to either wishful thinking or to mislead investors and advertisers.
Timeout.ru’s own audience has always had a little bit. Up to 80% of visitors to the site both bought and continue to buy from other projects. Let's try to answer three questions:
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- What do 634 thousand Muscovites do on the website Timeout.ru ?
- How did they get there?
- Will the advertisers of this site get the expected effect?
In the spring of this year, Timeout.ru closed access to the statistics of its meters on Rambler and Mail.ru. But that part of the statistics , which is impossible to close, gives an exhaustive answer to the first question.
Most visitors came to the site Timeout.ru , to immediately leave him and never return. This is what the monthly frequency says: the average reader of the site looks at 2 pages per month.
For comparison, visitors look at the “ Poster ” on average of 12 pages per month, at “ Afisha@mail.ru ” - 7.5, at “ Yandex.Afishe ” - 7 pages. Even on the St. Petersburg version of Timeout.ru, this figure is 5 - almost three times higher than on the Moscow site.
The second question is: where does such a passive audience come from?
Today to attract traffic on the Russian Internet is easy and inexpensive. On traffic exchanges like RedTram and Novoteka, one transition costs about 3 cents . You can get 600 thousand people a month for 15-20 thousand dollars.
The audience acquired in this way does not show interest in the resource that it hits. It can be safely called untargeted, random. The size of this audience demonstrates not an interest in the topic and product, but a modest budget for attracting cheap traffic. These are the dead souls of the internet.
Writing dead souls in the Coverage column is easy. Moreover, it is extremely seductive. These people were actually on the site in the period under review. Another thing is that they almost immediately closed it.
Discover projects with a significant proportion of dead souls is easy. Their main feature is the low ratio of the number of pages shown per month to the monthly audience (that is, the average number of pages viewed per visitor per month). I will give a few examples.
| Sites with a high% of dead souls | Sites with low% of dead souls | ||
| Title | Number of pages viewed / audience (month) | Title | Number of pages viewed / audience (month) |
| Sight | four | Lenta.Ru | 13 |
| Gourmet.Ru | 2 | Restaurant.Ru | 9 |
| Expert Online | four | Gazeta.Ru | 13 |
| Your day | four | KP | 9 |
| REGNUM | four | RBC | 21 |
| Timeout.ru | 2 | Poster | 12 |
(Sources: @Mail.ru and Rambler's Top 100 )
And finally, the third question: what does the advertiser get?
The advertiser from the sale of dead souls suffers the most. After all, a brand placed, for example, in the “Cinema” section of Timeout.ru , addresses its advertising message to an audience that goes to the cinema or watches it at home. But people who come to the site in the manner described can have completely different interests:
The return on advertising on such sites is minimal: they are visited by random people who are not interested in the subject of the site. Is it worth the spoiled reputation of immitation of large coverage, everyone decides for himself. According to the owners of such projects - it seems worth it.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/9241/
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