Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog » Traffic

Big numbers vs local audience – what should regional newspapers chase?

Laura Oliver — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:15:30 +0000

The conflict between chasing huge web traffic figures or meeting the demands of a core local audience online is one of the key challenges facing regional newspaper websites, according to a group of digital editors, who gathered last week at the University of Central Lancashire’s (UCLAN) Digital Editors Network meeting.

Coming together on the same day as the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures for the regional press were released, assessing current strategies for building web traffic was certainly topical. January had been a record month for the Lancashire Evening Post, digital editor Martin Hamer was proud to say with 8,215 user comments on articles on the site and 4,121,621 page impressions for the month beating the previous record of 3 million.

Average time spent on the site per visit had never been more than 6 minutes, but had risen to 6 minutes 15 secs in January, said Hamer.

Crucially 85.65 per cent of those visits came from within the UK – a figure the Post is keen to increase and several of the editors present said they had abandoned promoting content via social sites such as Fark, which had previously been used to drive traffic to websites from an international audience. With some local advertisers said to be in need of some digital hand-holding, the group suggested that guaranteeing a strong local online audience would be crucial in securing ads.

Web analytics are helping digital editors to understand the casual nature of most reader’s experience of their websites, added another journalist, whose group of sites sees 32 per cent of visitors only looking at one page, but a core 5-10 per cent looking at 10 pages in one sitting or visiting several times a week.

Growing that 10 per cent and make their engagement deeper and monetise it should be the priority, he added, and there have been some big shifts in the thinking around this recently: several groups admitted to cutting back or dropping video and podcasts entirely.

Instead building interaction using social media was encouraged and, as part of this, not chasing big numbers on these platforms, but rather focusing on engaged, local users and improving the service to meet their demands. Focusing on who those followers are and responding to those users who engage with the paper via those platforms will be more of more value in the long term.

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Making money from registered (non-paying) users

Judith Townend — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:20:23 +0000

Subscription revenues for FT.com have risen 43 per cent year-on-year, helping the newspaper keep in profit for 2009, the Guardian reports.

But its management has also flagged up the potential in other areas, too: BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan Jones’ interview with FT.com managing director Rob Grimshaw touches on the money-making potential of registered news site users – who don’t necessarily pay.

What’s interesting is that the middle group, those who register but don’t pay, are still proving lucrative. The 1.9 million people registered users have given some very basic information such as their job title.

That’s enough, according to Mr Grimshaw, to allow the FT to run a targeted advertising and marketing operation with high yields.

While the FT’s higher tier of paying subscribers brings in around £20 million a year, it is still thinking about the freeloading clientele.

So are non-paywalled publishers missing a trick by not setting up registration systems, for fear of traffic drop-off?

It’s perhaps worth going back to my interview with Rob Grimshaw in January:

User analytics
Monitoring the behaviour of 1.8 million registered users and 121,000 subscribers is a big part of the FT’s marketing strategy, he said.

“Their details are in a database: we have a lot of demographic information about them; we’re also able to combine that with their normal activity on the website. That data base is a goldmine that brings benefits to many parts of the business.”

Specific advertising can be exposed to a certain audience and direct communication can be made by email, he said. “1.8 million users have self-selected as people who are interested in our content and our business,” he added. “It is an area where there are enormous benefits to be gained.”

He argued that privacy is not infringed by the publication’s methods: “We never focus on behaviour of particular individuals: we are always looking at things in aggregate; how a sector of our database of users behaves.

“We would never allow an advertiser access to that [user information]. That would be both unacceptable and illegal.”

The success of companies like Amazon was due to carefully targeted marketing, he said:

“Some of the most successful companies out there have built their businesses by understanding the behaviour of their users in a very defined way; using their insight to develop their business decision making.”

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Statistics on internet and social media use: why email is doomed

John Thompson — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 12:59:41 +0000

According to this video presentation by Jesse Thomas, eighty-one percent of email is spam. But if you view the rest of the statistics, you can see how email is becoming rapidly irrelevant as a key communications – and publishing – tool.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. Hat tip: @adders

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Regional online traffic compared; Johnston Press comes out top

Judith Townend — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 18:59:20 +0000

I’ve had a little play with today’s Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic’s (ABCe) six-monthly multi-platform report for July – December 2009 and produced a few graphs.

Johnston Press was top of the traffic charts with 384,016 daily unique browsers – partly thanks to the Scotsman which attracted 86,694 daily browsers on average over the past six months. In second place for daily unique browsers (which ABCe now prioritises over monthly statistics as a better measure of site popularity) came Newsquest with 320,975 browsers. Closely behind, Trinity Mirror, which recorded 287,130. Of the bigger groups, it was Northcliffe in fourth position with 256,123. GMG saw the biggest drop-off overall when period-on-period monthly unique browser figures were compared: -17.8 per cent.

For the next multiplatform report, it could be all change: GMG regional titles will be part of Trinity Mirror, following the sale agreement earlier this month; and the effect of Johnston Press’ pay walls, launched in November may well have kicked in. They seem to have had a limited effect on this period’s statistics, but it’s worth noting that traffic had fallen for the Johnston Press network from 6,985,175 uniques in October to 6,161,875 in December 2009: down by over ten per cent in two months. Traffic had been dropping off since July, however, well before the pay walls were introduced and of course, the group has only rolled out the scheme over a few of its smaller sites so far. Unfortunately, the trialled sites don’t feature in the individual site break-down.

This chart shows the period-on-period change for each newspaper group, July to end of December 2009. (ie. compared with the previous six months)

Unique daily browsers, by regional newspaper group:

GMG Regional Network

Trinity Mirror

Iliffe News & Media Ltd (note that the largest column is its entire network overall, which includes other sites as well)

Johnston Press

Newsquest

Midlands News

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PDA: Telegraph.co.uk will chase channels not web traffic, says digital editor

Laura Oliver — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 08:38:47 +0000

Telegraph.co.uk will move away from chasing high reader numbers online to focusing on “content, commerce and clubs”, says Edward Roussel, digital editor at the Telegraph, in this interview with PDA.

With the realisation that high web traffic figures does not guarantee a sustainable business model, Roussel says the focus will now be on developing channels. Part of this will be the work of Project Euston, the Telegraph’s new digital entrepreneurial unit led by Will Lewis, which has now been up and running for three weeks.

Euston is not a private club where only certain people can operate. It is designed openly. We have done it so that any one of our over 500 journalists who has a brilliant idea can apply for funding and other resource, and try to make it a reality.

The channel strategy will focus on creating content and commercial opportunities, such as shops and clubs, around niche areas and PDA picks up on the site’s existing gardening section, which carries a shop and drives readers to buy.

While there are opportunities to charge for access to certain areas, such as crosswords, by setting up clubs, Roussel adds that there are no immediate plans in place to go behind a universal paywall.

Full post at this link…

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NMA: How pay walls could affect the ABCes

Laura Oliver — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 09:06:49 +0000

How will website traffic measurement be affected by the introduction of pay walls? Suzanne Bearne considers the impact on UK newspaper websites audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe).

Full story at this link…

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Paywall results in for Newsday as US newspapers see dip in traffic

Attiq Sadiq — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:59:49 +0000

Some interesting takeaways from new traffic stats for US newspapers released by Nielsen this week and reported by Editor & Publisher.

Unique users to the Newsday website, which went behind a paywall in late October, decreased by 2.2 million in October 2009 to 1.7 million in November.

Elsewhere 16 of the top 30 newspapers in the figures posted a year-on-year drop in unique users – in part a result of the bumper traffic created by the presidential race in November 2008.

Unique users to the New York Times, USA Today and LA Times websites fell by more than 20 per cent year-on-year, according to the November stats. But the New York Times did record the highest number of unique users for the month at 16,635,000.

But the biggest winner by far in November was Tampa Bay Online, which saw a gigantic 354 per cent jump in unique users to 1,724,000.

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Mixed fortunes for top US newspapers in November traffic figures

Attiq Sadiq — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:30:42 +0000

Mixed results for US newspaper websites a year on from the traffic surge generated by the US presidential race, according to Nielsen Online figures reported by Editor & Publisher.

The stats suggest that readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution spent 12 minutes more on its site in November 2009 when compared with the same period last year.

Half of the top 30 websites recorded a year-on-year increase in average user time spent on site, with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution posting the highest average time for the month at 23 minutes and 38 seconds.

But the New York Times’ website recorded the biggest year-on-year decrease in average time spent on the site by users. The figures suggest a drop of more than 19 minutes in the past year to a time of 17 minutes 17 seconds for November 2009.

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Mediaite: Traffic has dictated online news coverage in 2009

Laura Oliver — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:58:26 +0000

Glynnis MacNicol for Mediaite says it should come as no shock that the media “in a year of hard news [2009] (…) has gone soft” and devoted time and coverage to “shiny distractions” of stories.

[U]ntil someone creates a new, workable business model the coin of the internet realm is traffic. And traffic is most cheaply generated by frequency and shock value, two things which are very much at odds with in-depth reporting (…) Traffic talks in the new media internet world, what it does not do yet is report and/or research whilst penning the required 15 posts per day.

Full post at this link…

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Bits Blog: Traffic patterns visualised at the New York Times

Laura Oliver — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:16:21 +0000

Fascinating videos from the New York Times exploring where geographically-speaking traffic to its website comes from and what kinds of devices are being used to access it.

Explains Nick Bilton on the NYTimes’ Bits Blog:

The top video represents readers coming to the website from the United States. The second video shows a map of our global readers. The circles indicate two things. First, the yellow circles represent readers coming to the main website from desktop or laptop computers, and the orange circles indicate readers using mobile phones to access our mobile site. Second, the size of the circles represents the number of readers at that moment in time. You can see the corresponding time stamp in the upper left corner of the videos.

The videos show the traffic patterns for 25 June 2009 – the day news broke of Michael Jackson’s death:

The New York Times site traffic, US, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

The New York Times site traffic, World View, June 25, 2009 from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

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