http://www.beet.tv/2009/05/wsj-has-booming-growth-with-redesign-up-160-in-april-nielsen-reports.html
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Wall Street Journal's web site has jumped to more that 12 million monthly unique visitors in April, an increase of 160 percent over the same period last year, according a Nielsen Online report published today in Editor & Publisher.
Wsj.logo We surmise that a big part of the jump has resulted from the complete site redesign which was implemented in September. We assume that the financial crisis has driven considerable traffic.
Internal Wall Street Journal Memo
Trumpeting the news to the staff on Friday, Alan Deputy Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal, whose responsibility includes the paper's online operations and Almar Latour, managing editor of the WSJ.com, sent around this memo to the WSJ.com staff on the growth:
Folks -

We'd like to alert you to a significant milestone achieved by WSJ.com in April.

Nielsen recorded a 160% increase in visitors to the site from a year earlier, for a record total of 12.4 million. No other major news site is growing at anything remotely close to that pace. The New York Times, for instance, had a decrease in traffic over the same period.

The Nielsen numbers have their problems. Our internal metrics suggest an much larger audience. Yet the base is consistent, so the trends are real.

We believe there are a number of important reasons for that growth:

-Your enthusiasm in reporting, writing and rapidly filing speedies/urgents is making our online news more dynamic than ever.

-Our multimedia content is richer than it has ever been - with your articles supplemented by videos, information graphics, slideshows, audio presentations, etc.

-We are engaging with readers more deeply than ever before - our comments sections have become venues for a kind of rich and intelligent conversation that is unique