Drudge Report Named #1 News Site

When it comes to website optimization is a high bounce rate a good thing? I've always viewed it as a bad thing because you are loosing customers. They took one look around, didn't see anything they liked, and left. Maybe I've been thinking about this the wrong way.

If you look at the Drudge Report, who is now the #1 news site and has 500 million monthly page views, you start to see things differently. Their entire site is made up of links, which means their entire model is based off of sending people away from their site. The length of time their users spend on the site is the amount of time it took them to find what they were looking for. The shorter the amount of time the better and they always come back wanting more. So they've got a high bounce rate and a high percentage of returning customers.

The bottom line is to give your customers what they want. Don't try to bait them into clicking from page to page to keep them on your site. The faster they find what they are looking for the happier they'll be, even if that means sending them away to a third-party site.