Today we removed this page from our web site:
Pennsylvania’s Lobbying Firms on the Web
which was posted 4 years ago.
People still come to this page – it has been the second highest point of entrance page to our site over the past 4 years, only surpassed by the home page. It provided names of registered lobbying firms in Pennsylvania, and links to their sites.
So why did we delete the page?
First of all, the content was four years old. Compared to today’s lobbying firm marketplace in Pennsylvania, it was not only dated, it was incorrect. Firms were listed that no longer exist. Firms were not listed that are growing in this marketplace. There were firms with wrong URLs because they have changed, there were firms with no provided URL that now have web sites.
Some may say it is better than what else is on the web for this content niche, but it isn’t accurate enough for us.
Secondly… we have no intention of updating it. There is no upside for us as a business. Why do I say this? Because the VAST majority of users of this page used it to look at lobbyists web sites, but had no interest in what we do as a business. We know this because we saw the patterns on Google Analytics. In 4 years there have been nearly 1800 page views of this page. The average visitor to this page spent 22 minutes there. Of that, 61 views actually moved on to another page on our site after visiting this one.
That isn’t enough curiousity of the page’s audience for the rest of our site to make this page worth maintaining for us. And we don’t want to provide grossly incorrect information.
Finally, there is this marketplace that is interested in this information, and interested in something different than what these folks put out.
https://www.palobbyingservices.state.pa.us/
By getting out of the way and pointing out the interest in this information, maybe some else will fill the void. This is really the best thing we can do for this information marketplace.