Digital developments at CNN: Gustav raises traffic, as new international digital role is created

CNN’s web traffic did rather well out of Hurricane Gustav: a press release issued yesterday told us that breaking news channel CNN.com Live ‘more than doubled its highest day on record on Monday, by serving more than 1.7 million live video streams globally’.

That figure represents a 124 percent increase on their previous highest day - February 21 - when it streamed the debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

In other news, another release announced the appointment of CNN’s first vice president of international digital services: Nick Wrenn, current managing editor for Europe, Middle East & Africa. Although based in Atlanta, Wrenn will manage all of the digital content outside of the US in his new role, bringing together CNN.com/international and mobile with its broadband services.

Wrenn will report to Tony Maddox, executive vice president and managing director of CNN International.

“Our digital services are playing an increasingly important part in the growth of CNN International and this new position ensures that they will be leveraged and incorporated into our current business appropriately,” said Maddox in the statement.

Tags: africa, Atlanta, Barack Obama, broadband services, CNN, CNN International, Hillary Clinton, Hurricane Gustav, International Digital Services, Management Change, Middle East, Nick Wrenn, Tony Maddox, United States, web traffic

Telegraph.co.uk inserting keywords to drive traffic?

Simon Collister has blogged about Telegraph.co.uk’s rising web traffic making it into this month’s Private Eye.

The Eye apparently writes:

“[Telegraph] news hacks are sent a memo three or four times a day from the website boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first par of their story.”

(Shades of the England football team inserting song lyrics into post-match interviews under Glen Hoddle…)

As this appears in Private Eye the usual caveats apply, but similar practices at the Telegraph have been suggested by the Observer’s media diary:

“The Daily Telegraph has been accused of inserting keywords into copy to ensure its website gets the maximum number of hits, so it was interesting to see the following comment on telegraph.co.uk, posted in response to a rather dry piece about civil liberties penned by advertising guru Maurice Saatchi. ‘Dear Mr Saatchi,’ it began. ‘Your sister-in-law [ie Nigella Lawson] is second only to Holly Willoughby in my affections.’ You may wonder what the photogenic TV star has to do with 42-day detention periods, but it can’t harm the traffic figures.”

Is the Eye onto something or is this just another Guardian-Telegraph conspiracy theory?

Tags: google, Simon Collister, Telegraph.co.uk, the Daily Telegraph, web traffic

WAN 2008: Le Figaro: 20% of revenues from online by 2010

Le Figaro is predicting that 20% of its revenue will be generated by its online operations by 2010.

But the French newspaper has plans to beat this, Pierre Conte, deputy managing director for new media and advertising for Le Figaro Group, told delegates at the World Association of Newspapers (WAN) conference today.

After rising from 2 million unique users to its websites to 8 million in two years, the group’s web traffic now accounts for 1 French internet user out of every four.

Last year its online revenues accounted for 13% of its total income – so how will the publisher build on this?

Gradual integration
Online success will only be achieved if all the group’s editorial teams want to take part, Francis Morel, managing director, said.

As such Le Figaro adopted an ‘invite not assign’ policy, giving journalists the opportunity to do work for the websites if they wished (though initially for no extra pay).

According to Morel merging editorial teams for print and online was seen as essential, despite concerns raised by the unions.

Journalists became increasingly enthusiastic about working for the websites and now both editorial teams are on the same floor under the same editorial head, though Morel insists this has been about building bridges and not enforced integration.

Advertising
The group has sought to recoup floundering revenues from print classifieds by making a concerted push with this advertising online, setting up a team to find advertisers for online-only.

Contextual and behavioural advertising is also being experimented with.

E-commerce and diversification
Building around the flagship portal of Le Figaro, the publisher has launched specialist sport, finance and lifestyle websites, in addition to acquiring several e-commerce sites.

Content has also been syndicated to other websites, though this is not a long-term business model, Conte says.

“This business [selling content to other websites] will continue to be weak and limited. We need to work on ad revenue. We are not reinventing anything by saying that, but we need to integrate our sales house.”

Content
News remains a priority online for all the group’s content-based websites. On the Le Figaro site a commenting function has been added to articles and submissions from users are welcomed.

Le Figaro has also set up its own TV studio to produce video clips for online and mobile.

As a word of warning, Morel stresses that the digital developments in these areas have not been at the expense of the print product.

“It is indispensable to continue to invest and focus on print, because while the internet is a key territory, it will not replace print.

“We need to be extremely cautious and prudent. The internet is a very volatile market. We need to be very flexible at any time to change our course because we do not know what tomorrow holds.”

Tags: behavioural advertising, e - commerce, e-commerce sites, finance, Francis Morel, internet user, Le Figaro Group, online operations, online revenues, Online success, Pierre Conte, print product, The group, WAN, web traffic, World Association of Newspapers

Guardian most popular newspaper website in UK, according to Nielsen Online

Some significant differences between the figures for unique users visiting UK newspaper sites released by Nielsen Online today and those announced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) last week.

While both rank the Guardian as the most popular in the UK, Nielsen’s figures suggest the site attracted 3 million unique users in the UK in April compared to 7,762,826 recorded by the ABCe.

The Telegraph attracted 2.7 million UK uniques in April, according to Nielsen – around 3.5 million less than the figure reported by the ABCe.

By the Nielsen figures the Sun attracted 1.9 million UK unique users, the Times 1.8 million and the Daily Mail 1.7 million over the same period.

Nielsen calculates its traffic figures using a panel-based method called NetView, which the company describes as ‘around 45,000 UK internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis.’

In contrast, websites register themselves with the ABCe, which then audits data on web traffic recorded by the sites.

Very different methods – very different results.

Interestingly Nielsen also provides data on the ‘engagement’ of UK unique users with a site, differentiating between ‘heavy’ (>15 minutes), ‘medium’(>5 - >=15 minutes) and ‘light’(<=5 minutes) users.

The results of this analysis suggest the most popular online newspapers – the Guardian and Telegraph – have the highest percentage of light visitors (with 83%and 81% respectively).

The results for engagement in full:

Sun: 14% heavy, 16% medium, 70% light
Times: 13% heavy, 17% medium, 70% light
Daily Mail: 12% heavy, 14% medium,75% light
Telegraph: 7% heavy, 12% medium, 81% light
Guardian: 6% heavy, 11% medium, 83% light

The figures suggest that the Times is the only title to have gained in ‘heavy’ users since January 2008, while the Telegraph has recorded the biggest increase in ‘light’ users over the same period.

As Stephen Brooks, UK managing director for Nielsen Online, pointed out in the release: “Analysing the Telegraph’s audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site’s improved visibility in search results,”

“This encapsulates the ‘reach vs engagement’ conundrum that newspaper sites face – is the best path to financial success attracting the most visitors or having a smaller core of more engaged users?”

Tags: Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic, internet-users, Nielsen Online, online newspapers, search results, Stephen Brooks, Telegraph, The Guardian, The Times, United Kingdom, web traffic

BusinessWeek.com revises 2005 article on blogs because of ‘longtail’ traffic

BusinessWeek.com has looked to data from its web traffic to update a story originally published in 2005 (pointed out by The Bivings Report).

After seeing that their article ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business‘ was continuing to attract significant traffic, authors Stephen Baker and Heather Green decided the demand for the information meant an updated version was necessary.

“Type in ‘blogs business’ on the search engine, and our story comes up first among the results, as of this writing. Hundreds of thousands of people are still searching ‘blogs business’ because they’re eager to learn the latest news about an industry that’s changing at warp speed. Their attention maintains our outdated relic at the top of the list. It’s self-perpetuating: They want new, we give them old,” wrote Baker and Green.

The article has not only been given the new headline ‘Social Media Will Change Your Business‘, but now features annotations and updates from experts.

An editor’s note at the top of the revised piece openly explains this strategy (emphasis is mine):

“When we published ‘Blogs Will Change Your Business’ in May, 2005, Twittering was an activity dominated by small birds. Truth is, we didn’t see MySpace coming. Facebook was still an Ivy League sensation. Despite the onrush of technology, however, thousands of visitors are still downloading the original cover story.

“So we decided to update it. Over the past month, we’ve been calling many of the original sources and asking the Blogspotting community to help revise the 2005 report. We’ve placed fixes and updates into more than 20 notes; to view them, click on the blue icons. If you see more details to fix, please leave comments. The role of blogs in business is clearly an ongoing story.

“First, the headline. Blogs were the heart of the story in 2005. But they’re just one of the tools millions can use today to lift their voices in electronic communities and create their own media. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace, video sites like YouTube, mini blog engines like Twitter-they’ve all emerged in the last three years, and all are nourished by users. Social Media: It’s clunkier language than blogs, but we’re not putting it on the cover anyway. We’re just fixing it.”

The original version still exists on the site, but directs readers to the updated piece. The writers have also been using their blog on the site to gain feedback from readers on what should be changed.
So that’s re-optimising the article for search engines, meeting the demands of readers and promoting the site as an up-to-the minute information source, all rolled into one.

Tags: Heather Green, Ivy League, search engine, search engines, social networks, Stephen Baker, web traffic, YouTube

Rise in web traffic for Myfootballwriter.com

Commenting on Roy Greenslade’s analysis of Newsquest’s advertising decline, myfootballwriter.com’s Rick Waghorn has indicated some traffic success for MFW’s Ipswich site.

According to Waghorn, unique users to the site increased from 5,500 in December last year to 22,000 by January.

In terms of advertising, Waghorn added, the number of banner, button and sky ads delivered by the site has increased ‘13-fold’ year-on-year to 1.3 million last month.

“We may still have a long way to go in getting our commercial model to catch up with the editorial one, but having just witnessed our new Ipswich Town site quadruple in uniques in a month… at least I’m not going quietly into the night,” he writes.

Tags: advertising decline, Ipswich Town, Rick Waghorn, Roy Greenslade, web traffic

Publishers’ vertical search can rival Google, says AOP forum

The potential of vertical search engines to wrestle web traffic away from search giants like Google was a topic of debate at yesterday’s AOP forum.

The nature of vertical search, according to the speakers, points readers towards hand-pick sources and presents results in a more dynamic and user-friendly way than the major search engines.

These could be key advantages in the battle to reclaim web traffic from Google and its contemporaries, according to speakers Jonny Orange, media and publishing account manager at Endeca, Simon Baptiste, strategic product manager at FAST, and Daniel Pollock, vice president and lead analyst at Outsell Inc., in the audio below.

While agreeing that publishers can ally against Google and other search engines by denying them access to content - see clip below - Graeme McCracken, chief operating officer for Reed Business Search, said Google should be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for publishers.

McCracken also announced that RB’s B2B vertical search engine had attracted 350,000 unique users over the last month.

Tags: business to business, Daniel Pollock, Endeca, google, Graeme McCracken, Outsell Inc., Publishers vertical search, Reed Business, search engine, search engines, search giants, Simon Baptiste, web traffic