We attended Connecting Industry’s launch event last week to find out the plans for the website and the related print titles. We were pleased to hear that the print publications will be ABC audited: dropping the audit has raised questions about circulation quality, and this is something that should be easy to fix.
The site will also be audited. Online advertising, however, is so measurable that we’re not sure how much benefit this will give to the site. If you place an online advert, you know how much traffic is generated, and you know how many people register or download data. Do advertisers really need audits for websites? It will be interesting to see if this move has a positive impact on the site’s ability to attract advertising revenue. With relatively modest number of page views per month, given the number of publications linked to the site, perhaps the biggest challenge is to grow, rather than audit, the traffic to the site.
Whatever happens, it’s good that there is an investment in the print and online publications in the Connecting Industry stable.