Is it bad for an online writer to know how much traffic their posts get?

Interesting:

What’s more, The Verge is not alone in this practice. Re/code, a tech site run by Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, the longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, also won’t share traffic stats with writers. MIT Technology Review holds numbers back too.

“We used to show the writers and editors traffic, and told them to grow it; but it had the wrong effect. So we stopped,“ says Jason Pontin, CEO, editor in chief and publisher of MIT Technology Review. ”The unintended consequence of showing them traffic, and encouraging them to work to grow total audience, is that they became traffic whores. Whereas I really wanted them to focus on insight, storytelling, and scoops: quality.”

That phrase – “traffic whore” – tells you everything you need to know about why some journalists have an aversion to chasing traffic. They fear it creates an incentive to do the wrong things.

“As a general rule, we do not judge writers by numbers,” says Kara Swisher, the co-executive editor at Re/code, the new name for the former AllThingsD team. “In fact, we discourage it and urge them to cover what they think is right. We do not ignore traffic — we pay attention to what works in headlines — but we don’t put press on reporters to hit numbers.”

The sentiment holds across a lot of other places, at least according to an informal poll of journalist friends:

Quentin Hardy, deputy tech editor at the New York Times notes, via email, that reporters can find traffic data if they do some digging, but “the real question is how it drives thinking. Here it would not be considered something useful to over-obsess about. I have certainly never seen anyone write a story strictly because of the traffic it would get. To do so might arguably seem corrosive. We are much more focused on securing and growing a certain type of readership, usually educated and curious, which values accuracy, depth of knowledge, and reliability as much as speed.”

Bruce Upbin, the managing editor at Forbes, says traffic info “is instructive but it shoudn’t override taste.”

A reporter at a leading business newspaper says her editor stopped providing traffic stats, and she’s glad. She can tell which stories resonate based on comments and social shares. But “very rarely” does anyone in editorial actually talk about traffic.