Your Archive Page Matters More Than Your Homepage

Homepages are for people who already know who you are. Archives are for the person who arrived from a two year old link and is deciding whether anything else here is worth their time.

The argument runs the same way every time. Someone measures the thing that is easy to measure, a decision follows from the measurement, and two years later the decision is a convention nobody remembers agreeing to. What follows is an attempt to take the convention apart and look at the parts.

What the numbers actually say

Three publishers shared their figures on the condition that we did not name them, and the shape of all three is the same: a long, thin tail of readers who arrive from somewhere old, stay longer than anyone predicted, and never appear in the weekly report because the weekly report is about the front page.

None of this is an argument for doing less. It is an argument for measuring the part of the work that survives the week it was published in.