Matt Kelly of the Mirror decries what he believes to be a cruel delusion on the part of newspapers, who have used SEO techniques to accumulate a broader audience — but have succeeded only in attracting “locusts” who have little long-term value, while at the same time cheapening their content and advertising.
Below, he brags about how low the traffic from search engines is to two new sites that the Mirror launched, deliberately ignoring SEO:
Crucially, traffic from search engines is ridiculously low for a newspaper website. Around 15 percent for MirrorFootball and less than 10 for 3am. That means the vast majority of traffic has either come from bookmarks, or a referral from an informed source. We get a lot of traffic to both sites from social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Not recommendations from a search engine, but from a friend. That’s how to grow a meaningful audience.