(See the first part of this post)

What the Journal does have that nobody else does is more than a million paying subscribers to its Web site, giving it what I’ve very roughly estimated at $60 million to $70 million a year in subscription revenue.

But—and this is critical—that revenue is not all the Journal gets from its subscribers. It gets ads from them, too, and I’m not privy to the numbers, but I’ll bet you that each spends far more time on the site and sees far more pages than the average non-subscriber. In other words, the subscribers account for a disproportionate amount of the advertising revenue, too.

The point is, you can optimize your search engines all you want, but if you have a high fixed-labor-cost structure like a newsroom, that ain’t gonna cut it, and your core readers are who you need to focus on, not adding marginal ones that add near-zero revenue.

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.

Michelle McLellan reported that Slate’s editor David Plotz, in a Mizzou speech recently, said that Slate has seven million unique visitors but is shifting its priorities to focus on just 7 percent of them. Why? Because they’re the loyal readers who love the site’s stuff (or hate it so much they can’t resist it—shout out to Audit readers Mike H and Mark Richard!) and are by far the most valuable to it.

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this ability to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

This is a critical point. You can’t be everything to everybody. Don’t try to be. MinnPost’s Joel Kramer is making similar noises.

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.

I’ve been asking for numbers like these for a long while, so thanks to Kramer for providing them:

According to Quantcast, 168,000 different people visited MinnPost during the past month (as measured on Oct. 28). This is a somewhat smaller number than unique visitors, because Quantcast aims to count a person only once even if he or she visits from, say, both office and home.

About 71% of these visitors to MinnPost in the past month were passersby, Quantcast reports, and they accounted for 32% of the visits to the site. Another 29% of the visitors are called “regulars,” which means they visited the site at least twice but fewer than 30 times, and they accounted for 51% of the visits. Finally, there are the addicts — fewer than 1% of MinnPost’s visitors — who visited at least 30 times each and together accounted for 17% of the visits.

Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.