3:52am, Brooklyn

There’s not an unusual amount of stress going on right now in either my home or work life.  Money’s okay.  Health is fine.  But I find myself often awake between the hours of 3 and 5 am.  I realize it’s always the same things that are keeping me up.  There are portentous trends brewing in my work as a user experience professional and a digital publisher, and in those hazy hours of early morning my thoughts are dominated by them.   The first one I want to post about is Smashing Magazine.

Smashing has less than 850 hundred articles and covers 12 categories – all focused on web design and presentation-layer programming.  About.com has hundreds of topics and over 700,000*  articles online.  If you compare Compete.com’s Unique Visitor statistic for each site in September 2009, About.com gets about 57 visitors per piece of content compared to Smashing magazine’s 900.   (note: Compete uses a proprietary method for calculating unique visitors that does not correspond to the number reported by most web analytics programs, so these numbers are much lower than the official numbers.  But the relationships are what matters here.)  If I do the same calculation on various other media sites and blogs, I see that nobody is even close to Smashing Magazine’s traffic per piece of content ratio:

Compete.com Unique Visitors by Relative Size in Google Index

Smashing’s guide to Photoshop tutorials alone has over a million visits – a single post!  I personally follow most of what Smashing publishes and it’s no surprise that they have this great traffic. They post twice daily – each post is like a treasure trove of useful content, packed with images. And the truly impressive thing is that even though they cover a small niche – the design community – they are clearly a profitable venture, with 11.9 million pageviews in September, 2009 from a specific, high-value audience.   To put it in perspective, A List Apart has almost 4 times the number of high quality articles targeted at the same community with some of the same contributors and seems to get about a quarter of Smashing’s traffic.    These guys are clearly doing something right.   And it’s all being done with what presumably is a small staff in a slightly tricked out installation of Wordpress.

In another bit of quick analysis, I started typing urls and shortening them in bit.ly for the past 25 articles published on various how-to sites, including Smashing, A List Apart, and About.com.   Bit.ly tells you how many total referrals it sends for each shortened url, so it’s an interesting glimpse into competitive data at the individual post level.   (Note: About.com publishes, or at least updates, a lot of articles every week, causing them to be re-indexed by Google.. so take “latest 25″ with a grain of salt in that example.)   Then I tried checking SEO on those articles by typing in the keywords referenced in the article’s title and seeing how high they ranked in Google – e.g. what % of the articles appeared in the first page of Google search results.

Comparison of Last 25 Posts (through 10/17)

I know what you’re thinking.  This is a real ‘apples and oranges’ comparison. Why compare totally different kinds of sites to one another?   Well, I find a couple of things interesting about this statistic.  The main thing is that Smashing posts are immediately finding an audience, which leads both to great traffic and great SEO.   A List Apart posts are getting good traffic when published but it’s not translating to great SEO, probably because of the way they are written (more literary in style, and less direct) and that Google does not favor them as a highly trusted source in their PageRank algorithm.   I put About.com in there as a control – just to contrast this new wave style of online publisher with the old wave.   There’s no way of knowing what sort of traffic About is getting on these particular 25 posts, but I can confirm that there’s not a lot of Twitter buzz about them.  I do know from other experiments that it’s hard to top About.com in getting automatically SEO’d on a random topic… they have a strong first-movers advantage and Google seems to favor them accordingly.     Also, it’s getting increasingly hard to be the first on any topic anymore.  If there’s one thing AdSense has done, it’s hugely raised the numbers of people trying to make a living as online publishers and being first into a topic niche is getting nearly impossible.

So Smashing has really stumbled across the formula for success- deliver high-quality content and cultivate an audience.  Online publishers can no longer publish into the void and hope Google will find the content.  The insight is clear – be more like Smashing.  Now, only if it were that easy… and if only I could get back to sleep.

* based on custom google query to count content detail pages. method is a rough guestimate of a content websites’ size