#WANIndia2009: Newspapers must end obsession with traffic and SEO, says Mirror's Kelly

Newspapers' obsession with chasing traffic has devalued their content and must be stopped if they are to gain a return on online investments, Daily Mirror and Mirror.co.uk associate editor Matt Kelly has said.

Speaking at the World Editors Forum (WEF), which is being held alongside the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) annual conference, Kelly said that following guidelines from Google and exalting search engine optimisation techniques had lead the newspaper industry down 'a path of mythic riches'.

Reflecting on the push for SEO and online traffic by newspapers over the last two years, Kelly said: "As an industry in a great frantic headlong rush to accumulate users at any cost, many of us are all too quick to abandon anything that stood in the way of SEO.

"If little things like character, brand - the ingrained values that made the print product a success - got in the way, well, the ends justified the means. Content wasn't king; traffic was: whoever, from wherever, reading whatever. It didn't matter as long as the audience grew."

But the growth in audience led to a collapse in value for advertisers with as much as 90 per cent of online advertising inventory going unsold, he said.

"The very CPM model we'd prostituted our brands for online began to punish us (…) In treating SEO as the be-all and end-all of online publishing, we devalued our content in the mind of the users," said Kelly.

Mirror Group is more concerned with building an engaged audience, in particular in the UK, he added. Kelly suggested that 59 per cent of Mirror.co.uk's audience is domestic.

Kelly's comments echoed those given to paidContent.co.uk in August, following the launch of standalone sites for the Mirror's football and 3am sections, which eschewed SEO recommendations.

Since launching, only 15 per cent of MirrorFootball's traffic comes from search engines and 60 per cent of its online audience comes from within the UK. Only 9 per cent of 3am.co.uk's traffic is driven by search; while UK visitors constitute 65 per cent of its audience.

"These three sites, with their disparate approaches to SEO, and their varied revenue streams, are a big step in the right direction. But they're a drop in the ocean of change we need to make as an industry if we're going to reverse the damage we’ve done to ourselves in the last fifteen years of the internet," he said.

"There will always be free stuff out there on the internet. But if we want any hope of moving to a position where people will happily hand over their cold, hard, cash for our content online, the very first step we need to take is to re-establish in our online businesses that sense of value, brand, and uniqueness that we take so much trouble to do in print.

"If that means putting journalism first, and SEO second, then, as a journalist, I welcome that."

Yesterday at the same conference, Dow Jones CEO Les Hinton criticised Google's relationship with newspapers, saying the search engine had promised eyeballs and commercial opportunities but had failed to deliver on this potential.

All coverage of #WANIndia2009 from Journalism.co.uk can be found at this link.

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