PPA Magazines 2008: Timesonline readers ‘obsessed with house prices’

Readers of TimesOnline are obsessed with house prices and road tax, according to Anne Spackman, editor-in-chief of the title.

Readers of the site’s business section also go home early on Fridays, Spackman told delegates at the PPA’s annual conference.

The information gleaned from the site’s search queries is vital to understanding Timesonline readers and shaping content on the site, she said.

However, while search data helped journalists to understand ‘the hook that pulls the reader in’, she stressed that just writing to maximise search rankings is not what journalists are for.

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More analytics for YouTube

More analytics are now available from YouTube following the recent introduction of its YouTube Insight feature.

The video site has added a tool to help users see viewing trends for their clips.

Information on how viewers came to their video (e.g. through a search engine or other website) and what search queries led them to it will be provided.

The Insight service will now show the links of up to 50 external websites directing viewers to videos, a post on YouTube’s own blog says.

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OJR: Using Google Trends to fine-tune your news website

Google’s tool can help online publishers tweak their content to maximize traffic from search engine users, says OJR.

‘Google Trends allows you to select up to five words or phrases, then shows you how those search terms rate relative to one another in both the volume of search queries handled by Google, as well as news references tracked by the search engine. It’s an addictive site for a data geek, like me, and essential for any online publisher who wants to optimize his or her publication to attract more visitors from search engines, such as Google.’

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BBC: Web 2.0 tools help Heathrow crash reporting

BBC Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones outlines how the tools she used to report Thursday’s crash have changed from 10 years ago.

Now the first destination is Google with search queries rather than calls to the video libraries and checking the BBC archive.

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