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Excepts from Steve Outing's comment, posted at 14:50 on  4 Jul 95:
 
> I'd be interested in others' experience.

Similar site, similar experiences. 

AOL is the single largest domain for NewsLink users. Netcom is 
second, but Prodigy is growing rapidly and about to overtake it. 
Still, as a whole, those three account for less than 10% of total 
traffic. An assortment of smaller .com domains is by far the most 
prevalent.

My current design isn't conducive to graphics checks, as I use only 
four GIFS total and two (one of them a background) are used on virtually 
every page. Hits show up about 80% graphics-on for the main, 
non-background images, but that number may be skewed by its repeated 
use. The two unique GIFs come in at about 67%. These are up 
substantially from 55% when the page was more heavily graphic.

I would be worried, by the way, about the dropoff from top to bottom 
on your main page. Any dropoff in my mind equates to bad things -- 
mostly, a user who cancels out a page before it finishes. I might be 
tempted to create more, smaller pages. That strategy was very well 
received at NewsLink and gives us even better information on exactly 
what parts of the service are used most frequently. On average, 
NewsLink users visit from half a dozen to a dozen different pages 
per visit.

Your site doesn't encourage registration, as I recall. You might want 
to consider adding it. Some of the most interesting stuff comes from 
NewsLink's registration log. While AOL, for example, shows up very 
strongly for new users, it's much weaker for repeat users. Repeat visitors 
are much more likely to be from local ISPs than are new users in 
general, but AOL in particular seems weak among the 
Prodigy-AOL-Netcom triumpherate. Corporate and industry affiliations  
tend to be much more common among repeat visitors, as well. 

Interestingly, people who aren't involved in journalism or education 
make up a large portion of NewsLink's audience. I haven't computed an 
exactly figure (I'm about 50,000 registrations behind in transferring 
information to my database programn), but it seems that 
non-education, non-journalism users are the biggest growth area for 
the service. They don't seem to be as regular as the journalistic 
readers, but some come back quite a bit.

Conversely, most of the people requesting surveys or files from 
NewsLink tend to be journalists. I would have guessed that this bit 
of interactivity, with a chance to sound off on the media, would have 
gathered more non-media attention.
______________________________________________________________________

Eric K. Meyer          NEWSLINK ASSOCIATES      largest free news list                             
meyer@newslink.org    research & consulting    http://www.newslink.org
______________________________________________________________________

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