With no disrespect to any particular anchor or employee, ABC News just isn’t one of my favorite entities. It wasn’t overly disappointing, then, to learn that a joint venture with Facebook has thus far failed to gained traction or generate traffic.
After all, upon first hearing of the partnership, I tried to be polite, but the obvious just had to be stated: “sounds like a joke.” People tend not to look for political news on Facebook, and that’s precisely what ABC News tried to supply. Then, after getting their fill on the social network, folks were supposed to head to the main ABC News site.
Michael Learmonth has details of the project’s results, writing, “ABCNews.com self-reported a 28% spike in unique visitors in November to 16.3 million from the same time a year ago; page views increased 7% to 148.1 million. But they also reported a 21% jump in October while Nielsen NetRatings says traffic to ABCNews.com was actually down 4% in October.”
He then adds, “They’re not getting much help from Facebook, which reports just 10,300 daily users of the ABC News application.”
Admittedly, the 2008 presidential election is still a long ways off, so there’s plenty of time for the ABC-Facebook arrangement to save itself. “12-Pound Tumor Consumes Man’s Face” is one of the current ABC News “Top Headlines,” though, and that makes me think some other news site might be more deserving of traffic.
