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Monday, September 18, 2000
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Stale Content Keeps Online News Satisfaction Down
Problems with shallow, stale, disorganized content plague online
news delivery say online respondents to a new Web research study
from cPulse.
Poor content is cited as the number one reason Web surfers go
to another site, explained the survey.
cPulse warns that online news services should polish up their
coverage and organization in order to satisfy their site visitors
in time for the November elections and other major news events
coming up this fall.
``While industry surveys show that online media readership is
booming, our survey indicates that consumers are not generally
satisfied with the Web news experience, ''said Jody Dodson, cPulse
executive vice president.
According to the survey, one in every five visitors to a news
site leaves unhappy - nearly 20 percent. cPulse analysts also
predict that nearly half will not return to a specific site,
based on response to its survey. In addition, only 19 percent
of site visitors are extremely satisfied with their news site
experiences -- indicating there is a lot of room for improvement
in online newsrooms around the country.
Since the beginning of the year, customer satisfaction with
the online news industry has declined 9 percent, according to
cPulse researchers. In that same time, satisfaction with general
content sites has increased 3 percent and satisfaction with the
entire Internet is up 2.4 percent.
What does cPulse find as the top issues that concern
readership online?
- Poor content organization and inability to quickly find an article
is the number one reason people to defect to other sites.
Defectors find these aspects of their sites visits 70 percent less
satisfying than the average visitor does. Recommendations from
customers polled in the Web survey include offering more executive
summaries, accurate indexing and better search abilities (e.g., by
date and/or keyword)
- Shallow coverage is the next leading turnoff among Web news site
defectors, who were 54 percent less satisfied than average
consumers with depth of reporting. In-depth coverage is absolutely
vital in maintaining loyal readers, the survey said.
- Consumers are insisting that content remains fresh,
round-the-clock and up-to-the-minute. Frustration with stale
content has increased 8 percent since the beginning of the year.
One respondent noted, "The single most frustrating thing about
this site is that when I go to locate an article from the print
edition, it's usually two weeks or more before it will come up in
a search. By which time it's usually dead information."
The research from cPulse's Satisfaction Solutions Group resulted
from 137,160 interviews with visitors on 123 websites between
January 1 and July 1, 2000. cPulse uses 60-second interactive
interviews administered via pop-up based technology. Website
visitors are interviewed while they are actually on a website.
Based in New York, cPulse LLC, a Gartner Group,
Inc. company, was established in November 1998 to develop and
market customer service solutions for Internet businesses.
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