Open Letter to Forbes.com

To: Forbes.com chief executive Jim Spanfeller

I saw the New York Observer article about your current turnover and how there is a tension between the business and editorial sides over page view metrics. According to the story, at least one former staffer called Forbes.com "a page-view sweatshop," and then it quoted you as categorizing that as a "fair thought." Then came the following section:

"One of the fundamental differences of online versus offline [is that] online is completely trackable," he said. "You have 60, 70, 80 stories [in print], and you don’t know how well consumed each one is."

Therefore, Mr. Spanfeller said, "not looking at the data would be foolish," and "tracking page views is something that is very important."

I'd like to suggest that you may be too focused on a particular metric without putting it into a wider context, which could quickly send you down the wrong track.

Yes, it's probably an arrogant observation, but I'll make the argument. First, have you ever done a usability study on the web site to see how people move through it and where their eyes rest? Have you done a correlation study between where articles appear and how often they're viewed? Have you checked the screen resolutions of people coming in to the site to see if your layout can all be seen without the consumer having to scroll back and forth to see everything? (Personally I got tired of having to scroll down the screen to see what there was.) If not, you could in fact be directing people in particular ways, and then effectively trying to follow them to make decisions, with the result that business becomes a puppy chasing its own tail.

Next, it might be wise to try and get a handle on what types of stories actually draw people in - not into the stories themselves, but which topics and headlines help to keep people stuck to the site and which ones over time have a strong correlation with people coming to the site in the first place. Granted, this is really hard to decipher, but it is important. If you want customers to drive what you have on the sight - and why wouldn't you? - then you need to make sure that you're drawing the right conclusions. The classic example is of the apparel company in which red sweaters vastly outsold blue sweaters. The management team knew it made the right decision to emphasize red sweaters - until the next year when a competitor took most of the company's market share by selling blue sweaters, because that's what customers really wanted, although the company made so few blue units that the consumers made due with what they could find, until someone else offered the products they really wanted. Analyzing data is important, but some data in the wrong context can be worse than none at all.