Tracking The Online-Only Seattle P-I: Traffic Down 20 Percent

By Joseph Tartakoff - Fri 27 Mar 2009 03:05 PM PST

It makes some sense: Cut your editorial staff by 80 percent, and there’s at least a decent chance that Web traffic will tumble. And that’s just what has happened at the new online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Page views are down about 20 percent in the week since the newspaper killed its print edition and became an online-only publication, according to internal numbers. Seattlepi.com averaged between 1.3 million and 1.4 million page views a day this week, down from 1.7 million page views a day in January, when the site was able to draw large chunks of content from the print edition. And more than a third of those 1.3 million to 1.4 million hits are from photo galleries and comics. (Disclosure: I worked at the P-I until the very end.)