The homepage is dead

May 15, 2014 - qz.com - The homepage is dead, and the social web has won—even at the New York Times

People who used RSS readers long ago would have accessed homepages less often.

But obviously, socialmedia's popularity since 2008 or so has contributed the most to users not accessing a site's homepage directly.

This is another reason why media companies should simplify their homepages, instead of cluttering them into an indiscernible mess.

Traffic to the New York Times homepage fell by half in the last two years, according to the newspaper’s internal review of its digital strategy.

That’s not necessarily a reflection of any problems at the Times but the reality of how news is now distributed on the internet.

Homepage traffic is declining at most news sites as readers increasingly find links to news articles from social media, email, and other sources.

(This may be a self-serving argument: Quartz barely has a homepage at all, in recognition of this trend.)

Overall traffic to the Times isn’t falling; it’s just coming in through the “side door” more often.

The document describes the homepage situation this way:

Traffic to the home page has been declining, month after month, for years. Traffic to section fronts is negligible. Traffic on our mobile apps, which are mostly downstream replicas of our home page and section fronts, has declined, as well.

Home pages, section fronts, and apps are pull media - that is, they rely on readers actively requesting them.

Pull media has quickly been replaced by push media, as the Times report makes clear in so many words

#media - #design - #reading