I find myself liking this thesis from Ryan Chittum of The Audit at the Columbia Journalism Review:

There’s been a little mini-trend of sanity amongst online publishers talking about focusing on their core loyal visitors rather than chasing after the sugar high of a surge of junk Digg traffic or whatever.

The value of that prized and desired quarry, the loyal reader, from Joel Kramer of MinnPost.com:

MinnPost shares this strategic belief in the power of a loyal, engaged audience. Loyal readers are prospective members. They are ambassadors for our work, in person and online. They are the people whom our advertisers and sponsors want to communicate with, on our website and at events. They add content to the site through their comments, news tips, and Community Voices articles.

It is easy to lose sight of this more engaged audience, because of the most-quoted measures of traffic on the Internet: unique monthly visitors and page views. A unique monthly visitor is one web address visiting a site at least once during a month. Page views represent the total number of pages opened by all these visitors on all their visits.

But on most websites, ours included, the vast majority of unique visitors are passersby. They come through a search or a link from a blog, and they visit the site precisely once, usually for a quick glance at one page. In many cases, if you ask them 30 seconds later which site they just linked to, they won’t remember. It would be folly for us to build a business plan around consumers like that.

A little applause for Kramer’s gentle disparaging of the page view count, which strikes me these days as chiefly used for milking revenue from advertisers, while not necessarily telling you anything useful about who’s reading you, or why. Just because something can be measured doesn’t mean the metric is valuable.

But what does it mean to cultivate that loyal core of committed, engaged readers? Kramer himself is asking that of the MinnPost readership. Interestingly, he’s received no responses as of yet.