Motor Trend, Autobytel and CarsDirect Web Traffic Craters. Or Not.
Website analysts compete.com have compiled a chart of '07's biggest winners and losers. The stats reveal that three automotive websites have the dubious distinction of sharing the title of biggest loser, site traffic-wise. Autobytel clocks-in at number eight, with website traffic falling 82 percent to 556,938 uniques per month (UPM). Motor Trend sits in fourteenth place; its visitorship cratered by 71 percent, to 902,684 UPM. Carsdirect's traffic fell down 69 percent to 3,396,388 UPM. Not surprisingly for a company competing with Google to provide site stats, compete ain't got nothin' to say about the losers. But its commentators are asking a whole lot of questions about the data's integrity. Meanwhile, Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed blog reckons the numbers may reflect a scary equation. "Fewer new cars purchased = less traffic required to car purchasing sites, right? Possibly, but there is no way that you'd see, say, a 5% drop in car purchasing turn into a 90% traffic drop." One might also conclude the drop simply reflects the quality of the sites involved, but I couldn't possibly comment. Oh, and TTAC has just crested 1.4m page views for the first time, racking up 477,783 uniques per month. Just in case you were wondering… [thanks to deanst for the tip]
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Good going on the TTAC numbers. The AutoByTel drop makes some sense- they've been trying to shift traffic to some of their other domains, such as myride.com. But the other two--seems unlikely they'd be down that much.
I think the thing that you're missing is the amount of competition that this sector has now. I think that sites like yours are swiping traffic from everyone but jalopnik and autoblog. Everyone has an automotive blog/news site now. Even Me!
It appears that my TTAC license plate frame is doing the trick...