Celebrity Blogs, RSS Fuel People.com's Growth

Posted on October 11, 2006

Min Online has an article that says blogs and RSS feeds are fueling traffic growth at People.com. People.com's Fran Hauser told Min that even though people are reading blogs that still come back to People to verify if stories bloggers have posted are true.

Many of these newcomers become true brand loyalists. According to People Group Digital g.m. Fran Hauser, about 70% of PEOPLE.COM traffic comes in at the front door, which means a high share of the audience deliberately returns to the PEOPLE.COM URL rather than tripping into the site sideways, via article links at portals or blogs. "That's a special metric to us," says Hauser. "It shows how loyal and engaged they are."
Some are downright FANatical. PEOPLE.COM traffic breaks into two distinct browsing types. "Grazers" pop in briefly for a headline check and a celebrity snap or two. "Enthusiasts" hit the site several times a day and rack up more than a dozen page views as they drill into article sections and slideshows. The design tries to capture both mindsets, with headlines and a ticker along the left well and large photo sets inviting you to browse.
Surprisingly, PEOPLE.COM execs are seeing ever more traffic coming from the site's RSS ( Real Simple Syndication ) feeds, which Google and Yahoo users now can add to their personalized home pages. The site gets about 2 million visits a month just from the RSS channel. Likewise, the celebrity blogs are becoming an important funnel of new traffic, if not always the final word. "We talk to a lot of consumers. They will go to the blogs to get a quick fix but we hear that they always come to PEOPLE.COM to see if [the story] is true," says Hauser.

2 million monthly visits via RSS is impressive. Min's article speculates that part of the reason behind People's RSS success is that they have a youthful demographic with an average age of 28. Surveys conducted about RSS have found that younger demographics are much more likely to use RSS and news aggregators.