'NYT' Pot Calls Forbes.com Kettle Black
Last week, the New York Times' business section tut-tutted at Forbes.com's selling itself to advertisers with best-possible audited site traffic (15.3 million visitors in February) when that figure has been slightly revised down by the auditor, not to mention much less impressive recent numbers (7.3 million visitors in July). Forbes.com exec James Spanfeller claimed the poor July showing conflicted with their much more cheerful internal log numbers, and could thus be discounted. High card always wins! The NYT also grumbled about the percentage of Forbes.com visitors actually going to the latter's car-sales site, not to mention traffic-whoring like the "career women" debacle, "American's Drunkest Cities," etc., rather than content ostensibly of interest to the business reader (or advertiser). Ignoring all that, Spanfeller complained that NYTimes.com prefers its own optimistic internal traffic numbers, so Forbes.com is hardly alone in that respect — something the competing NYT biz section should have noted for transparency's sake. NYT business editor Lawrence Ingrassia admitted that Spanfeller was right, but added that the point didn't "warrant a correction." Just because you're correct doesn't mean you get a correction, see.
