Marvel.com Gets Mad Traffic
Author: Stephen Gerding
July 8th, 2005
A press release was dropped today to talk up Marvel’s new deal with ICON Advertising Solutions taking over their ad sales on Marvel.com. Pretty boring stuff that’s really not particularly newsworthy, but there was one interesting tidbit of information.
Marvel.com features interactive information and activities for many of Marvel’s comic book titles and characters such as Spider-Man, The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk. Marvel.com delivers over 18 million impressions to 750,000 monthly unique users, mainly in the male teen and young adult demographic.
I’m not one of those who thinks that there’s a cap of 200K when it comes to comic readers in the US, but I still have a hard time believing that 750,000 individual people visit Marvel’s website every month, yet they have to promote the hell out of a title with variant covers and the likes just to reach orders of nearly 200,000 copies. Can there really be over 500,000 people going to Marvel.com on a monthly basis that have no interest in the actual comics being published? Are the movies that powerful at directing traffic to their website and still that ineffectual at converting them into comic book readers?
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6 Responses to “Marvel.com Gets Mad Traffic”
July 9th, 2005 at 2:20 am
I suspect that they don’t track unique visitors longer than a day. Most of those “uniques” are probably actually repeats.
July 10th, 2005 at 10:37 am
They track users w/cookies so “unique” visitors is a mix of actual uniques and repeats who don’t accept the cookie. I wouldn’t be surprised if the real numer is somewhere between 4-500k. “Impressions” is a useless number of a graphics heavy site like theirs as each load of the home page is 15-20 impressions alone.
July 11th, 2005 at 12:04 pm
I would think that the movies do send a ton of traffic to their site, but like Guy says, I’d guess it’s somewhere between 4-500K. Still sad that the best sellling comic in the land can’t break 200K though, especially if that many people are interested in the publisher itself.
July 11th, 2005 at 2:45 pm
Yeah, I know that “impressions” are a useless statistic, but the unique users thing…man. How much longer will sites be able to pump their numbers up with misdirection before investors and advertisers catch on?
July 11th, 2005 at 4:06 pm
Interesting numbers. Unique visitors for CBR alone, not including the forums or ad server traffic, comes in much higher than Marvel.com. I’m pretty agressive about how we count uniques, preferring NOT to record them like most people do (expire the IP after a half hour of non usage).
Here’s one thing to consider, though. Marvel isn’t the kind of site you’d check two or three times in a day. You’d go once, then maybe come back a week later. So their actual number of unique visitors might be closers to 750,000 than 500,000.
Of course all of this is impossible to really measure unless you subscribe to Neilsen’s Net Ratings which is the most accurate analysis of site traffic, but also very expensive, not that Marvel couldn’t afford it.
July 11th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
According to Alexa.com, Marvel & CBR’s traffic rankings have been running about equal since the beginning of the year, while Newsarama’s been slightly ahead of them both, on average. DC’s right in the same range, too, though the get way more page views than all three of them.