Hey Bill, I think you're a bit off with your skepticism over CBC.ca's numbers:

"If that 10 million number is true, that's only because CBC has bundled all its properties together.

In a head-to-head competition for a Canadian audience, however, I'm pretty sure that CTV.ca draws more unique visitors monthly than CBC (disclosure: I work for CTV.ca but don't speak for it)."

First off, the numbers come from ComScore Media Metrix, which I think is widely viewed as a reliable source of online numbers. Most sites in Canada and the US view it like TV views the Nielsen ratings. And according to ComScore, CBC.ca is indeed the top news/info site in Canada (excepting portals like Yahoo and MSN-Sympatico). It has been since right after the federal election, and was propelled even higher by the Winter Olympics.

As for your assertion that "CBC has bundled all its properties together," I hope you don't mean Radio-Canada's French-language service, because it doesn't. SRC.ca is listed in ComScore apart from CBC.ca, and is an entirely separate entity. If you mean program pages, then yes. As does CTV.ca.

CTV.ca's numbers go through the roof when Canadian Idol is in season, because the show's web site is counted under its overall domain. I fully expect CTV.ca to overtake CBC.ca when Idol is in full swing again: the power of reality TV mixed with heavy audience participation.

Nothing wrong with that, but your post makes it sound like CBC.ca is claiming something that ain't true. I don't think that's the case.

All I can say, Landru, is that while I agree with some of what you're saying, I'd have to see some actual numbers from someone that CBC.ca alone pulls in 10 million unique visitors per month, because that doesn't make intuitive sense to me.

The Canadian online universe for news and information in January was about 16 million. CBC.ca alone is reaching 3 out of 5 uniques? Somehow I don't think so.

While the Olympics would unquestionably be a traffic-booster for them (as Idol is for CTV.ca), I would need to see some proof that CBC.ca is pulling in 10 million uniques.

There's a limit to what I can say because I don't want to inadvertently talk about internal CTV News business.

To slake my own curiousity, who are you and with whom are you affiliated? Do you have access to Media Metrix reports? Could you please email them to me?

Hi Bill,

I just read this (I've been away for a few weeks) - so I'm jumping in now to respond to a couple of your points. It'll be a bit of a long post, so bear with me.......

- Why does CBC measure global numbers. We do it because we think it's a useful number - we generally want to know who visits us, from where, and why. And it's interesting - our audience surveys tell us that about 80% of the people using CBC.ca from outside Canada are actually Canadian citizens living or traveling elsewhere. And not surprisingly, they say they're using us as a way to stay in touch with Canada. We're happy to serve Canadians wherever they are - so if we can help someone stay in touch with Canada by making it possible for them to watch The National online or read the latest news from their hometown, we're glad to be able to do that and we think it's worth measuring.

Our total worldwide audience averages about 10 million unique visitors per month. That doesn't include January and February - we take them out of the average because, as you said, those were unusually high-audience months for CBC.ca. That data comes from our server logs using WebTrends. We can't compare it to other sites because we don't have access to their logs. But it's the total picture of who's visiting CBC.ca.

- We also use Comscore data, which measures usage within Canada. This is also a good and useful number, and we can compare it to other sites. For five of the past six months, according to Comscore, CBC.ca has been the number one news/media web site most-used by Canadians. That means we'd been beating the Globe, CTV, Canada.com, Canoe, the BBC, NY Times, etc. - since December. When Andy said it on the radio, and when it was reported in the Toronto Star, it was true - as you say you saw in the Comscore reports somebody sent you. It's also true, as you say, that in May we dipped beneath Canada.com according to the ComScore numbers. Thats not a big surprise - we're often duking it out with Canada.com near the top of the list - and you're absolutely correct when you say the Olympics phenomenally boosted our traffic for several months. (The federal election was also huge for us - we had record-breaking traffic on election day, and then broke THAT record the following day. In fact, we had 15 record-breaking traffic days total, over the period covering the election campaign and Torino.) And typically CTV does well when Canadian Idol is airing, so we'll see what happens this fall.

- What both those numbers measure (the WebTrends and the Comscore) is CBC.ca alone. They don't include RadioCanada.ca. For some purposes, sometimes, we present our numbers jointly - for example when the CBC/SRC is reporting jointly on performance to the board. But we always try to be clear about what we're reporting - and the numbers above are CBC.ca by itself. They also, FWIW, don't include the CBC Shop.

If there's anything I haven't addressed let me know - I don't read your blog every day, but I check in pretty frequently. And I know that although you understand web metrics, not everyone does. So if you want an explanation of if/how CBC uses the various measures - hits, unique visitors, visits, pageviews - let me know and I'll ask our Research department to send it along.

Thanks, I enjoy your blog...
Sue

Hi Sue:

Thanks very much for taking the time to leave the comment.

A few things:

That 10 million worldwide number might be accurate (birdies tell me CBC's internal stats aren't particularly solid), but I think you would agree that's not a common number either.

Even the few people within CBC that I spoke with had no idea where it came from, let alone people from outside the corporation.

I think we can both agree that big events tend to drive traffic on the Web. CTV.ca (my employer) benefits greatly from Canadian Idol (we were ahead of CBC.ca from May to November of last year, according to CBC.ca's stats).

CTV.ca will benefit greatly from being the website of the host broadcaster for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, as you benefited from Torino this year and will from Beijing in 2008.

Ken Wolff (remember him?) told me at a Poynter Institute event back in 2000 how the Olympics were just an insane driver of traffic for CBC.ca.

As far as the election goes, my interpretation of your stats is that both CTV.ca and CBC.ca benefited about the same from increased public appetite for news driven by the 2005-06 federal election -- although CBC.ca may have benefited slightly more.

However, I suspect CBC.ca spent much more money on its election site. While this is unlikely to happen, it would be interesting for someone to study the cost structures of the various major news websites in Canada and develop a uniques acquired/dollars spent ratio.

For example, if a site had 1 million uniques and a budget of $2 million, is it doing better than a site with 800,000 uniques and a budget of $800,000?

Another thing you mentioned on your Metro Morning appearance was the total staff of CBC.ca: 160. Looking at this page on CBC.ca, I see 36 names attached to the news-gathering portion (including Jonathan Dube but not Tony Burman).

Here's CTV.ca's web team. While some recent hiring has expanded that list to about 15 (I believe that's correct), that's still far less than 36.

Thank you for your kind offer to send me more information on "if/how CBC uses the various measures." I'd like to take you up on that as I'm not a web metrics expert by any means. Such information can be emailed to blog-dot-billd-at-gmail-dot-com.

And thank you for being more accomodating with information about CBC.ca than your company's audience relations dept., which as I noted before, blew me off when I once tried to find out how many people worked for CBC.ca.

Glad to hear you enjoy the blog, even if you don't visit every day. As a reciprocal gesture, I'll try to make it to CBC.ca more often.

Regards,
Bill D.

Sure Bill - I'll ask Research to send you some stuff. Feel free to post it if you want.

Thanks,
Sue