by Bill Killen
(September 12, 2009) Mother Nature Network (MNN), the Atlanta-based news and environmental website that launched in January 2009, is growing rapidly and is poised to become the most used GreenSite on the Internet after only nine months in operation. MNN, the business which epitomizes the idea of doing well by doing good, has rapidly gained on the two other relevant sites in the GreenSite arena, Daily Green (launched by Hearst Magazines in 2007) and Treehugger (launched in 2003 and acquired by Discovery Communications in 2007).
MNN has steadily attracted users, audience, and members since its launch earlier this year. According to Alexa Information Services, MNN has recently passed the two year old Daily Green in Alexa’s Daily Traffic Rankings. And while Daily Green has been essentially flat in the rankings during 2009, MNN has been on a consistent upward trend since launch and appears poised to begin pulling away. If this uptrend continues for MNN, MNN could catch Treehugger.com by MNN’s first anniversary. Treehugger’s Daily Traffic Ranking has also been flat throughout year 2009 while MNN’s has been growing.
In several other key usage metrics, MNN already is outperforming Treehugger, a unit of Discovery Communications. Over the last month, MNN has averaged 3.4 Daily-PageViews-per-User compared to only 2.2 Daily-PageViews-per-User for Treehugger. And over the last three months, MNN’s Daily-PageViews-per-User are up 53%, while Treehuggers is down 1%. This seems to be a clear indication that visitors to the MNN site are finding the MNN site more compelling. Meanwhile, DailyGreen’s Daily-PageViews-per-User trail the pack at 1.65.
MNN users are not just clicking through more pages, they also appear to be more engrossed in the pages they are going through on the site. According to Alexa’s Time-On-Site stats, MNN users are averaging a robust 4.2 minutes per day on MNN. This is essentially double that of DailyGreen at 2.2 minutes and Treehugger at 2.1 minutes.
There also appears to be plenty of upside for MNN. Being the new kid on the block, MNN has achieved these traffic and usage levels with only 99 other internet Sites-Linking-In at this point in time. The six year old Treehugger has 9,795 Sites-Linking-In and the 2 year old Daily Green has 1,887 Sites-Linking-In. As word spreads of MNN’s rising status, you can be sure that more sites will be linking in, further fueling MNN’s audience growth trends.
I am projecting MNN to be the category leader by first quarter 2010. For those of you who are advertisers, this would be a great time to build a relationship with this rising star. The best value and “leading edge” aura for your brand is always achieved when you can catch an industry leader in its early growth stage before it becomes the industry leader. I also suspect from the general sensibility of the three sites that MNN currently has the most mainstream audience and most attractive demographics, although I haven’t seen any empirical data for verification.
When contacted for comment, MNN’s co-founder and CEO Joel Babbit downplayed any competition with the other sites. “We are all trying to make the world a better place to live,” said Babbit. He was quick to praise his organization saying that “the growth in our users and members is a credit to the outstanding work of our editorial group led by Emily Murphy, and the counsel of co-founder and Rolling Stones keyboardist Chuck Leavell and our Advisory Board.” He also credited MNN members and users who have increasingly added their own touch to the site through increased site interactivity and discussion.
This one’s a winner. Hop on board now!
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Bill Killen (billkillen@comcast.net) is the former Vice President of New Media Development for Cox Enterprises.
