On the Devaluation of Traffic

There's a fairly intense conversation today about how much traffic certain web sites generate over others. To me, a lot of it misses the point. As I have said in the past, Web site traffic overall is devaluing. The Long Tail is the culprit.

My Google Analytics account is my laboratory. And over the past year I have noticed a trend. Most of my traffic is from Google and they are largely passerbys. The same holds true for anyone who visits my site from Techmeme, Digg or even big blogs. A prominent mention in The Wall Street Journal a couple of weeks ago garnered me a whopping 40 visitors.

Brands are waking up to this as well. An Avenue A study found, according to AdAge, that "more consumers are coming to brand sites through the side door of search means search engines are starting to circumvent brands when it comes to online shopping."

So debating which sites drive the most traffic is really meaningless. A more fruitful discussion should be around what metric succeeds the page view. A lot of people are measuring by traffic, but those days are coming to an end - slowly.