|| Author: James Johnson|Tags: ,

Newsweek Bought Their Traffic Ahead Of ‘The Daily Beast’ Merger

Business

Last week it was reported that while The Daily Beast was seeing upticks in their own website traffic, recently acquired company Newsweek is down 24 percent in the past year and now it turns out that those numbers could have been much lower considering Newsweek was paying for as much as 60 percent of their original traffic.

Jeff Bercovici of Forbes revealed from a company spokesman that “much of Newsweek.com’s traffic,” came from a costly partnership deal that drew in a majority of the sites 5 to 6 million monthly unique visitors.

According to several sources former Newsweek parent company Washington Post Co. was paying up to $1 million per year to inflate traffic numbers rather than attempting to grow them organically.

It’s still unclear how much of that traffic purchasing The Daily Beast team knew about before the acquisition, however without the payments the sites traffic is only down 24 percent over a 12 month period, so perhaps they’re doing more right than originally assumed.