Ask any news leader whether page views are the right metric. Almost universally, the answer is no. They reward clickbait, punish depth and treat a reader who bounced after four seconds the same as one who read every word.
And yet most newsrooms still run on them. Leaders know better, but advertisers and philanthropic donors still value them.
Remove traffic and page views from the agenda at your next editorial meeting. What fills the space? If the room goes quiet, that’s the diagnosis.
The most provocative proposal
"We think if it's not big, then it's not working."
— Sarah Alvarez, Founder, Outlier MediaSarah Alvarez, the James B. Steele Chair in Journalism Innovation at Temple University and the founder of Outlier Media in Detroit, offers a radical reframe: measure civic engagement. Not whether people read the story, but whether they acted on it.
She shares that public comments at Detroit City Council doubled following Outlier's coverage of a city issue. That, she argues, is the north star because it's honest about what journalism is actually for.
Alvarez is clear-eyed about what this actually meant. "This didn't change things, but it happened in the real world. The information they got from Outlier allowed them to do something. I got this info, I showed up at a place and did something that is civically engaging."
She thinks the issue lies in the fact that most news organizations are focused on sustainability, but don't spend as much time asking what they need to create impact and fulfill the promise of journalism. "If we only focus on consumption, that could be perverting how we define news."
The metrics that actually predict audience health
The newsrooms getting traction with their audiences are focused on loyalty signals. Things like:
Repeat visitor rate
The share of your audience returning without a search or social prompt. The single most reliable leading indicator of subscription revenue.
Newsletter open & click-through rates
Signals whether your most committed audience is paying attention. Open rates measure reach within your owned channel; click-through measures whether the content was worth acting on.
Time on story
A proxy for whether readers are actually reading, not just landing.
Listen-through rate
Downloads tell you how many people started. This tells you who actually listened.
After Outlier’s coverage of a Detroit city issue, public comments at City Council doubled. Founder Sarah Alvarez calls it the only metric she actually trusts: not whether people clicked, but whether the information moved them to act.
Long Lead treats podcast listen-through rate as a primary success metric for their show. Their flagship exceeds 100%. Listeners replay segments. While the audience is not large, Long Lead treats the extremely strong engagement as a success signal and not as a problem.
Joy Resmovits, Senior Editor for Collaborations and Impact at The Trace, describes traffic as "an impact pathway." Not the destination. Just evidence that journalism is reaching people. One of the metrics she actually tracks is newsletter subscribers: stickier, more intentional, and a better indicator of whether readers chose to stay in relationship with the work. "Our north star is impact," she says. Traffic tells you whether you might be on the way there.