It’s a common misconception that when it comes to web traffic, more is better. That’s not always the case. Growing a web news property is really about establishing a community that cares about your work and your brand.
This is another reason why I think the ad-supported model for online news has to change to metered content. People who don’t invest in a brand are fickle customers, and one way to get people to invest in the brand is to charge them for your content. It’s a commitment, and people wills stick by the decision once made.
Take this story about covering “breast size” from former journalist Simon Payn, as related on Copyblogger today:
Because when we looked at where these visitors were coming from, they were in locations we weren’t targeting. (Frankly, I suspect most readers were 14-year-old boys in their bedrooms.)
And because we made money through selling advertising on the site, it harmed us commercially: our click-through rate on that day plummeted. After all, people from around the world who were looking for stories about breasts weren’t the kind of prospects the banks and insurance companies that were advertising on the site were likely to attract. These financial institutions wanted high-earning executives in two specific European countries.
Not all traffic is good traffic.
Eat Sleep Publish is a Seattle-based blog that explores the difficulties and opportunities currently facing the publishing industry. 
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You can say that again!! Jay Rosen, speaking in NYC last week, said something like: “There is no such thing as information overload; what we have is filter failure.” If you don’t develop a model that controls the ads, you can run into trouble.
Looks like an argument against CTR as a sales metric to me.
Transparency is the key. Ads for one-hit wonders should be different and be sold differently from those for your involved readership. Ads for fly-bys should never be sold on per-click or CTR basis.
Laura – spot on. I can’t argue with Rosen on that one.
Tim – It’s true, there’s a LOT of innovation that needs to happen with the ad sales models that currently exist. Different types of ads need to be sold on different metrics and, yes, priced differently based on the type of traffic they are getting.
I think a big hold up is changing over the ad sales staff from the print-world to the new media world, and changing the job incentives to match (i.e. no big commissions on national ad campaigns if those aren’t the kind of campaigns that help the paper).