This is the Nielsen I/PRO I/AUDIT report for Arizona Central for the month of July 1996. I was managing Arizona Central at the time, and this was one of the first attempts by anyone to put an independent, third-party number on what a newspaper web site was actually doing.
The point of the exercise was advertising. If we were going to sell space on the site, someone other than us had to vouch for the traffic:
This report is a standard, verifiable means for Web sites to report traffic to advertisers and media buyers/planners in order to facilitate effective placement of advertising.
I/PRO built the audit from a census analysis of our raw log files, reviewed by their audit analysts, and certified the results as “an independent, accurate, and complete summary of this web site’s activity.” The affidavit language matters more than it might seem now — media buyers had no reason to trust self-reported server numbers.
The month’s totals:
VISITS … TOTAL 56,757 / AVERAGE PER DAY 1,831 / AVERAGE VISIT LENGTH 8:33 minutes
And on the content side, 381,538 pages viewed, an average of 6.7 pages per visit. The top 50 pages accounted for 299,906 pages, or 78.6 percent of everything viewed.
What those top pages were is the interesting part. Job Search, under the classifieds directory, drew 13,584 page views — a reminder of how early classifieds moved online. Alongside the standard departments (FLASH, FEATURES, FUN, comics, Dining, Destinations, the Arizona Golf Guide, the interactive TV listings, Home Buying Choices), the news pages that show up are exactly the stories of that summer in Arizona: “Phoenix bombing plot,” “Symington indicted,” and “Arizona’s Olympians.” There’s also a page titled “Tell us what you think!” — 617 views for the survey.
The visitor-by-organization table is its own time capsule. America Online alone delivered 14,143 visits, more than seven times the next name on the list, Primenet, at 1,824. Arizona State University, GoodNet, CompuServe, Netzone, Microsoft Network, Internet Direct — the local ISPs and the national online services were the on-ramps. The top 50 organizations were 60.7 percent of all site visits. Geographically, 91.0 percent of activity came from the United States, with Canada at 1.8 percent and a scattering from Australia, the Netherlands, Japan, the U.K., and Germany.