United Airlines, $1.2 Billion, and Low Amounts of Web Traffic: Oh the Shame

By Chris Kerns | 1 Comments | Posted in in Analytics | Permalink

How painful is a low amount of web traffic? It can hurt in more ways than one. Take the example of United Airlines this week.

You may have heard that United Airlines stock crashed on Monday (reduced by 75%, around $1.2 billion worth.) Trading had to be halted. What's coming to light is that the stock's temporary downward fall was due to the following set of events:

1. The South Florida Sun-Sentinel is a newspaper site that gets a modest amount of traffic. Traffic levels are so low that around midnight Sunday night, a single pageview of an archived article resulted in the page being registered as the “most popular page" on the site at that moment.

2. Google’s newsbot saw the article listed as “popular”, and then assumed it was current news, giving it prominent placement it on it’s news site. Trouble is that the article was actually from 2002. And it was about United Airlines going bankrupt.

3. Investors saw the bankruptcy article as current news on Google, sold sold sold, and shares tanked. All sparked by, you got it, low web traffic.

The moral of the story is: you shouldn't be ashamed of low web traffic, everybody's been there. Every site is going to have areas where it needs to improve - whether it's popularity or functionality. But don't create prominent functionality based on those faults. Features that depend on the wisdom, or basic participation, of crowds tend to be better suited for sites that actually have crowds.

Also - when you're looking at trends with your traffic, make sure you step back and look at the absolute numbers to do a reality check on the trends your seeing. Percentages can be deceiving and misleading (just ask United Airlines - their stock is back on track now, but 75% is a bad day in anyone's book.)