Legacy newsrooms are questioning the value of page views. Financial Express Digital’s Vertika Kanaujia says engagement and trust matter more than raw traffic. New frameworks are shifting how editorial teams measure success.
News publishers focused on digital growth are reexamining how they define success, as Financial Express Digital’s Vertika Kanaujia told attendees at the Digital Media India Conference in New Delhi. She said that relying on page views as the main metric has led to misaligned editorial priorities and missed opportunities for building lasting audience relationships.
Kanaujia described three eras of news measurement: the mass-media period of television ratings and print readership, the search-driven era of keyword optimization, and today’s algorithm-dominated landscape. She argued that newsrooms now often analyze crawler behavior instead of real reader engagement, which can distort editorial decisions.
She pointed out that confirmation bias and misattributed causation are common pitfalls. Editorial leaders may use data to justify instinctive choices, while strong headlines or high impressions are sometimes credited for performance without examining the real drivers. Kanaujia said that when page views become the primary target, clickbait and headline chasing tend to follow.
To illustrate, she compared two Financial Express stories: a straightforward news piece that earned about 100,000 page views in 48 hours through Google Discover but saw little engagement, and a data-driven feature that took months to produce, attracted fewer views, but kept readers engaged much longer. She said the first type of story boosts short-term revenue, while the second builds trust and supports subscriber growth over time.
Kanaujia emphasized that page views are often mistaken for actual readership. She said a story with a million page views does not mean a million people read it, as technical factors can inflate these numbers. Many legacy newsrooms, she noted, still prioritize platform requirements over genuine user needs.
She recommended that publishers first define their organizational goals-whether advertiser revenue, subscriptions, or another objective-and then align data strategies accordingly. Letting high-traffic content categories dictate investment, she said, can undermine long-term growth.
At Indian Express, Kanaujia said, the organizational ‘North Star’ no longer references page views. Instead, the company uses a KPI framework that tracks engagement, content quality, relevance, retention, and subscriber conversion for every employee. Metrics like engaged time per user and consistency of returning readers are now central to performance measurement.
She cited The New York Times’ 2017 move away from page view chasing as an example, noting its investment in non-news content to deepen reader relationships. Kanaujia described the shift as a deliberate process that may cause short-term dips but delivers greater value over time.
She outlined a user-needs framework with four drivers: learning, understanding, feeling, and acting. Each maps to different KPIs, from page views for updates to social shareability for human-interest stories. She said matching editorial strengths to these needs allows newsrooms to set meaningful goals.
Kanaujia concluded that data itself is neutral, but its interpretation shapes newsroom strategy. Her remarks echo recent industry moves to tighten editorial standards, such as new transparency rules for AI-generated opinion content discussed in a recent report on publisher guidelines.
