Michael Silberman
General Manager, NYMag.com
Silberman and his team have championed a content-focused strategy that has dramatically increased traffic with nary an investment in aud dev.
Regional magazine publishers, while often particularly successful in print, sometimes find it difficult to repeat the same success online. Not so for New York, which under the leadership of Michael Silberman and a team effort from every department—editorial, design, audience development, IT, sales, and PR—has built a site that most consumer publishers would be proud of.
At NYMag.com, says Silberman, the demographic ratio of national visitors to regional visitors is 70 percent to 30 percent. That’s an important distinction because it has allowed the site to behave as both a regional, service-oriented content producer and a daily news and entertainment publisher with a national scope.
What’s also notable, is that the site’s content-focused strategy, with a robust SEO underpinning, has been, by far, the source of traffic and audience success. “We’ve seen some really strong content-driven growth and that’s been helped by SEO and an aggressive PR strategy of sending out links to other blogs and Web sites,” Silberman says.
Indeed, the link-back strategy has grown from a few hundred per week to many thousands per week. And in 2008 the site increased its news and blog pickups by 50 percent over 2007, all without a concerted spend in acquiring audience.
The turning point for the site was at the end of 2006 when it became a full-time daily news and content producer. Before this, the site relied mostly on a listings feature and weekly magazine content. Blogs were introduced—two at the end of 2006: Daily Intel and Grub Street, a food blog. Another, an entertainment and culture blog called Vulture, debuted in 2007. Then The Cut, a fashion blog, launched in 2008. At that point, the blogs had become the biggest growth engines. Between January 2008 and January 2009, blog page views shot up 332 percent from 3.5 million to just over 15 million, representing almost 30 percent of the site’s 56 million page views in January 2009, per Omniture’s SiteCatalyst.
In that same timeframe, the site boosted its uniques by 26 percent, from 4.4 million to 5.5 million.
“When it comes to fashion, entertainment or news, those have national appeal,” says Silberman. “We’re an interesting hybrid that straddles the two spheres.”
VITAL STATS
From 2008 to 2009, unique visitors are up 26 percent, page views 62 percent and blog pages views are up 332 percent.
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