The trend of giving weightage to traffic stats while making content-related decisions has caught up with magazine websites. This is just one of the things that caught my attention when I read the recent Columbia Journalism Review survey of standards and practices at magazine websites.

I guess that this trend holds good to some extent for news websites too, we now have instances of news websites  applying metrics realtime to reshape content and drive traffic to their sites.

What the CJR survey revealed is that nearly half of the sites surveyed had a "good understanding of what pieces of content individual piece of content are doing best and have that information on hand when making editorial decisions" or "closely follow traffic statistics for each piece of content, they are one of the main factors in editorial decision-making."

And is there a co-relation between profitability and traffic-based content  policies? Yes, says the survey. "Web sites that regularly use traffic statistics for content decisions are significantly more likely to be profitable. Sixty one per cent  of profitable Web sites use trafic statistics, as opposed to 34% of unprofitable Web sites."

So what impact will this have on those who stand by the journalism first policy? Those who think that quality journalism should not be subsumed by considerations that have to do with numbers - things like SEO and metrics.

I had, in an earlier post, touched on what Daily Mirror’s associate editor Matt Kelly said at the WAN India 2009 about this journalism first approach.

Also interesting is that the majority of the sites used a custom-designed CMS, either as a standalone or as part of a larger family of sites. Only 16% used an off-the-shelf CMS, but more interestingly, 10% used open-source. One-tenth of sites using open-source - that  was a revelation to me.

The survey, has dealt with several other issues, which have been discussed elsewhere: an example. One more: Survey Finds Slack Editing on Magazine Web Sites