To look at the full half of the phop, this website blackout is an opportunity for Kuensel as well as for its competing newspapers to explore the effect of the online newspaper's availability on sales of print copies. This is what we statisticians call a "natural experiment".
Here are questions that I'd explore if I were Kuensel:
- How are sales of Kuensel's print version affected on the days when the website is down? (look at the numbers, but also take into account factors like day-of-week and past sales)
- How are sales affected after the website comes back up?
- How sensitive are my online readers to such blackouts? (a survey and forum would give some ideas)
As a competing newspaper, I'd ask the following:
- How are the sales of my print newspaper affected on days when kuenselonline.com is down? (maybe people who go rushing for a Kuensel copy already buy other papers at the same time)
- How is traffic to my own website affected on days when kuenselonline.com is down?
Kuensel's website wasn't down. It was rather an issue with Druknet. Kuenseloline.com was not resolving to its IP address using Druknet's default DNS which was provided to all broadband connection users via DHCP.
ReplyDeletePeople should override their default settings for their broadband connections to use OpenDNS. Much more stable than Druknet's DNS with no noticeable speed difference.
@Drukhost, thanks! Apparently Kuensel changed their host on July 25th and now have a new IP address. As you mentioned, the DrukNet DNS servers are still not updated. I wonder why.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the excellent OpenDNS, I often recommend using Google's public DNS server at 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. They are able to resolve kuenselonline.com
Thanks again. I will post about this issue.