Fewer People are Visiting Homepages

Homepage. The makes you think of a comfy place in cyberspace to call your own.

 Photo Courtesy: Columbia Pictures

This is the place where you start your journey into the World Wide Web. Companies of all shapes and sizes spend lots of money designing homepages they believe will attract viewers. They debate on if and where ads should be placed.

Remember this scene from the movie "The Social Network"?

Eduardo Saverin: Hey, you know what? Settle and argument for us. I say it's time to start making money from TheFacebook, but Mark doesn't want to advertise. Who's right?
Sean Parker: Um...neither of you yet. TheFacebook is cool that's what it's got going for it.
Mark Zuckerberg: Yeah.
Eduardo Saverin: You don't want to ruin it with ads because ads aren't cool.
Mark Zuckerberg: Exactly.

Well, the power of the homepage, at least for news paper sites,   is decreasing. At least that's what a report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s 2012 State of the News Media Report says.

According to the Nieman Lab, "as more people enter news sites sideways — via search engines, links they see in emails, or via Facebook and Twitter — newsrooms are finding their homepages aren’t the starting points they once were. And the propulsive growth of mobile devices has accustomed news sites to presenting more than one face to the digital audience, through some mix of mobile-optimized sites, native apps, and responsive design."

Nieman Lab reporters talked to Google’s Richard Gingras, head of Google's news products division, "has argued that shifts in audience flow mean that we ought to be reconsidering “the very definition of a website,” and the possibility that it’s time to put “dramatically more focus on the story page” rather than the homepage," according to the Nieman Lab report.