Following on from last week’s City University study, which suggested that traffic drops when a news title goes online-only, Editor&Publisher reports on a decrease in unique users to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since it abandoned its print run.

The site was not among the US’ top 30 newspaper websites last month, according to data from Nielsen Online and posted a 23 per cent year-on-year drop in unique users.

It’s local counterpart and former online collaborator before it went online-only, the Seattle times, posted a 70 per cent year-on-year gain in unique users last month to its own website – recording 2.2 million.

However, according to a spokesman for the Seattle PI’s owners, in an article on the Puget Sound Business Journal, the Nielsen data is flawed and internal data suggets the site actually showed a 10 per cent growth in year-on-year traffic last month.

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Here’s a little moment of mirth from the closing session of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.

During the Q&A session, Media Guardian reporter Jemima Kiss asked Telegraph editor Will Lewis about the transparency of ABCe ‘benchmarking’ monthly web traffic figures and if he was planning to again use Hitwise metric results in Telegraph advertising.

The website had previously run an ad on the homepage quoting Hitwise and proclaiming its position as the top quality UK newspaper online.

The Hitwise metric is considered by some to be an inferior measurement of a websites’ traffic than the figures supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore or the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

A visibly riled Lewis told her that Telegraph marketing campaigns were ‘none of her business’ and that the Telegraph site stats were open for all to see on the site.

But what was it that riled him?

Was it the Guardian’s quest to have ABCEs recognised across the industry as the sole measure of websites metrics?

Having it rubbed in that according to this metric the Telegraph trails the Guardian by quite some way, almost in a polar opposite of the print edition?

Or was he tired of the puritanical zeal on this issue that encourages Guardian employees, it seems, to ask him a similar question every time he appears in public?

Listen here to the exchange:

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