In the same month that it launched its own metric for measuring readers across print, online and other media, the Financial Times has officially withdrawn from the monthly audit of UK newspapers’ web traffic conducted by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe). It’s been some time since the FT website’s figures were included in the monthly stats – listed as N/A below a print circulation figure in the monthly multi-platform reports issued by the auditor.

Says a spokesperson:

The FT no longer participates in ABCes as volume traffic measures have become less relevant to our advertisers and clients. We do not intend to compete on volume, rather the quality of our registered and subscriber readership.

Full story at this link…

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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

• ABCes: Independent.co.uk records biggest increase in daily browsers
• Trinity Mirror reports 10 per cent drop in advertising revenue
• Johnston Press’ ad revenues feel effects of recession
• IFNC update: CN Group, STV, ITN and Bauer in race for news consortia pilots
• Newspaper Society: Round-up of record web traffic for local media titles covering riots

Johnston Press has today reported half-year revenues of £218.6 million – down 25.4 per cent year-on-year.

Print advertising revenue fell by 33.5 per cent; while digital advertising revenues also declined – by 18.8 per cent.

The publisher’s revenue from employment advertising was down by 53.8 per cent, property ads by 54.2 per cent, motors by 29.3 per cent and from other classifieds by 11.5 per cent.

The company’s interim report said ad revenues were down 32.7 per cent in the first six months of 2009 compared with the same period in 2008.

In an attempt to improve their digital recruitment sites and therefore their appeal to recruitment advertisers, Johnston Press has entered into a joint venture with Daily Mail & General Trust, giving them access to the latter’s Jobsite software.

The report also expresses the group’s struggle ‘to compete with the regional activities of the publicly funded BBC digital presence’, claiming that it ‘distorts the markets within which they operate through making the charging for news content extremely difficult’.

“The timing of the economic upturn remains uncertain but advertising revenues are demonstrating greater stability
and we expect the cyclical improvement when it comes to more than compensate any structural change. We will
maintain our focus on costs and look to secure operating efficiencies during the second half of the year,” said CEO John Fry in the report.

Yesterday the publisher celebrated success after it was announced that it had attracted the most unique users, to its network of regional newspaper websites, in the first six months of 2009.

The publisher, which is responsible for more than 323 websites, recorded 6,864,820 monthly unique users on average over the period, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic’s six-monthly report for regional newspaper groups.

• New figures show ad revenue decline slowing at Johnston Press and Trinity Mirror
• Online revenues up for Independent and Johnston Press, but print ads fall
• Trinity Mirror reports 10 per cent drop in advertising revenue
• Northcliffe’s operating profits drop 81 per cent
• Regional online traffic compared; Johnston Press comes out top

Dennis Publishing‘s latest Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) figures have been released highlighting a growth in popularity for the publisher’s digital titles.

Dennis’ iGIZMO, which was launched in February, attracted an average of 101,785 unique users per fortnightly issue over the last year, a press release from the group said, while weekly title Monkey recorded 283,541 unique users on average and 1,009,298 for September.

The latest figures show a fourth successive rise in ABCes for Monkey, according to the release.

Fortnightly magazine iMOTOR’s issue average for unique users was 108,622 – 221,739 in September’s figures.

These audits prove that the digital magazine sector is a viable, growing and successful business model. In addition, these titles are really delivering for our advertisers,” said Bruce Sandell, head of NPD at Dennis, in the statement.

• Dennis signs PKR in first customer magazine deal
• Malcolm Coles: How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites
• Online mag Monkey expands into mobile TV
• Shiny Media reports October blog traffic boost
• Journalism.co.uk: Dennis launches new digital title Gizmo

Guardian News and Media (GNM) has become the second publisher to officially sign up for the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic’s (ABCe) six-monthly web traffic audits, according to a release from the bureau.

The new audits will provide detailed daily, weekly and monthly breakdowns of unique user/browser and page impression figures for sites within GNM’s regional portfolio, which have previously reported web traffic stats on an ‘ad hoc’ basis.

Regional GNM sites getreading.co.uk, manchestereveningnews.co.uk and manchesteronline.co.uk , as well as thejobsmine.co.uk will be analysed as part of the new arrangement.

Online traffic data will be presented alongside print circulation figures for the titles, the bureau added.

GNM follows Northcliffe Media, which signed up 10 of its regional websites for the new certificate earlier this month.

In a press statement accompanying the announcement, Northcliffe said it plans to increase the audit to 20 sites by 2009, and to cover ‘all major urban and regional sites’ in the future.

• MediaGuardian: ABCe audits under review
• Brand Republic: FT withdraws from ABCe audits for web traffic
• US newspaper circulations still falling, but decline is slowing
• Searchable database: National newspaper circulation figures for March
• WSJ.com: Major US newspaper circulations continue to fall

In a follow up to Tuesday’s announcement that the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) will provide user profiles alongside stats on page impressions and unique users, Guy Lipscombe, managing director of Survey Interactive – the firm behind the on-site surveys being used for the research – explained how the ‘enhanced ABCe certificates’ would work at yesterday’s Regional Media Research Forum (RMRF) event:

Lipscombe was joined by Sally O’Donnell, strategic marketing manager for Trinity Mirror Regionals (TMR), who let us in on some key findings from Survey Interactive’s audience research with the group, which involved on-site questionnaires completed by 53,313 interviewees across TM’s 110 regional and national websites:

• TM’s online portfolio in Feb 08 was reaching 3.8 million adults a month according to the surveys – a different figure from the 5.5 million unique users calculated for the sites at the same time
• More than a third of internet users from an area covered by a TM regional title accessed the paper’s website on a regular basis
• A third of TMR website users regularly use more than one TMR website
• The group’s regional sites had a higher proportion of ABC1 (the National Readership Survey classification for middle class) users
• TM regional sites were given an average rating by interviewees of 8/10
• The regional sites attracted a young audience, but not as young as expected, said O’Donnell: majority of users were in the 35-54 age bracket

According to O’Donnell, further research will be conducted soon, as the group’s digital audience continues to grow. Sales staff training on how best to use the figures collected by the research will also be implemented – with particular attention paid to the difference between stats for ‘adults’ and ‘unique users’ to the sites and how behaviour differs amongst print and online consumers.

• Associated Newspapers claim monthly reach of 22 million
• How did the national newspaper online sites report the August ABCes?
• RMRF: Regional Media Research Forum in new web launch
• Welt.de posts record traffic for February
• Paywall results in for Newsday as US newspapers see dip in traffic

The Guardian has admitted it mistakenly bought the keywords Madeleine McCann from Google.

By wrongly purchasing the keywords a link to the paper’s coverage of Madeleine’s disappearance appeared in a column of sponsored results when a search for her name was made on Google.

The newspaper has now taken down the link and has reviewed the list of keywords it owns, Marc Sands, marketing director for the Guardian, told Journalism.co.uk.

The paper’s purchase of the words Madeleine McCann was criticised by Justin Williams, assistant editor at Telegraph Media Group, on his personal blog, who said the practice showed the paper was ‘desperate’ to hold onto its position as the UK’s most popular newspaper website according to the most recent Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) traffic figures.

“The purchase of terms is a way of getting your stories, at a cost, in front of people. It’s absolutely what everyone does all the time,” said Sands.

[advert]A search for the terms shows the Mirror currently owns the keywords McCanns cleared, while a Google search for other keywords, such as Cristiano Ronaldo, show the the Sun and Times have also purchased phrases from Google.

“It is a way of getting it [news] distributed to people who have expressed an interest in that subject,” he added.

“The issue with the Madeleine McCann keywords is an interesting one. It’s like advertising, but not really: the only reason you and I search for a term is because we are interested in that term.”

The practice had been criticised in the blog post, he said, because of the Guardian’s previous stance on the coverage of the McCann story.

“The Guardian in the past has been very critical of the coverage of Madeleine McCann, saying it has been salacious and misleading. What the person in the blog post is saying is that Madeleine McCann is not to be treated in this way, so what on earth are they doing buying keywords?”

The issue led the paper to review its list of current keywords to assess ‘what news is okay to do it with and what isn’t', he said.

The Guardian buys thousands of Google keywords relating to current news stories every week, he added. It currently owns the keywords ‘stamp duty’, ‘university league tables’ and ‘post office closures’.

“Madeleine McCann slipped through the net. You don’t approve all these [keyword purchases] every day. We would have had to say to the company that buys the keywords for us: never buy the keywords for Madeleine McCann,” he said.

Search engine marketing and search engine optimisation of newspaper websites is a ‘new area’ for publishers, added Sands.

“Everyone is working their way through and trying to remain true exactly to the principles of what they’re doing, but also to ensure that they’re getting read.”

• CounterValue: Sun buys Natasha Richardson as sponsored link
• Liverpool Daily Post: Madeleine McCann keywords in every main local news story was ‘oversight’
• BBC Two Daily Politics – Greenslade and Meyer on regulation
• Journalism.co.uk top 10 blog posts in 2007
• MediaGuardian: Sky News apologises to Robert Murat over Madeleine McCann story

Global page views of Times Online’s blogs rose past the 2.5 million mark in May this year, according to figures from the publisher – an increase of 500 per cent compared to May 2007.

The graph below shows the overall growth of its top performing blogs. Daniel Finkenstein’s Comment Central and Paris correspondent Charles Bremner’s Le Blogue are shown to perform consistently well, while The Game blog and Money Central (no doubt spurred by the recent economic downturn) have increased in popularity:

The site’s top 10 blogs in terms of global page views in May this year were:

The Game Blog 562,835
Money Central 552,941
Comment Central 541,598
Alpha Mummy 170,862
Fanzine Fanzone 136,760
Charles Bremner 114,884
Formula 1 103,607
Snakes and Ladders 94,202
Mousetrap Technology 88,496
Red Box 85,96

As you can see the top three account for the majority of the blogs’ traffic. Figures for TimesOnline’s page views from May’s Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) report suggest the site recorded 117,826,926 page impressions. These stats therefore suggest blogs accounted for roughly 2.12 per cent of the site’s total page views.

• Herald adds web stats to homepage
• Guardian blogs complete move to new technology platform
• Shiny Media reports October blog traffic boost
• UK ad spend dropped 4% in 2008, says AdAssoc
• Shropshire Star posts 59% rise in page impressions

The Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) has completed the first stage of its review of how data is analysed by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) in its audit of newspaper website traffic.

One suggestion is to include all newspaper domains that contribute to the monthly traffic figures in the ABCe reports.

The review is ongoing with further reports expected in November.

• Brand Republic: FT withdraws from ABCe audits for web traffic
• Guardian: Mirror Group websites join ABCe
• Guardian debuts six-monthly ABCe figures for regional websites
• Hellomagazine revamps health and beauty section
• MediaWeek: How long can News International hide its ABCe figures?

The Shropshire Star recorded 1,630,103 page impressions in April, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe).

The figure rose by 59 per cent from the last audit of the site in November 2007 and 103 per cent year-on-year.
In April the site attracted 114,388 unique users – a 14 per cent increase over the five months from November.

On average the site recorded 6,942 unique users and 54,337 page impressions per day.

According to a release from publisher Midland News Association (MNA), the figures coincided with ‘a bumper harvest’ of user-generated content on the site following sudden snowfall in the county.

• CNET.co.uk attracts record audience
• Shiny Media reports October blog traffic boost
• Welt.de posts record traffic for February
• Mixed fortunes for top US newspapers in November traffic figures
• ThisisMoney.co.uk sees traffic surge in economic downturn

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?”

• Nielsen Online release: Web traffic to top 10 US newspapers grew 16 per cent last year
• Media Guardian: 15m UK users visted newspaper, claims ComScore
• Mixed fortunes for top US newspapers in November traffic figures
• Newsquest attracts 4.8m unique users in 2007
• Welt.de posts record traffic for February

A redesigned Daily Mail website – rebranded as Mail Online – is to be officially launched after a period of beta testing.

The old site will be shut down over the next couple of days as the new design is brought in, an announcement on the site said yesterday.

The revamp introduces a navigation bar with drop down previews of section headlines, a central picture gallery and a wider page format.

A bookmarking function to allow users to save stories on a personalised page is another new feature, while the right hand column of the homepage has been given over to articles from the newspaper’s popular Femail section.

Speaking to the House of Lords communications committee today, Charles Sinclair, chief executive of the Daily Mail and General Trust, said the paper had been ‘quite late online’.

“With one or two honorable exceptions the newspapers around the world were not making a good job of putting newspapers online,” he said.

“So the Mail has come to this rather late – in the last 18 months, but having decided what to do, it is now doing it rather well.”

The narrowing gap between audiences for the Mail website and Guardian.co.uk showed the success of its online strategy despite coming to the web relatively recently, Sinclair said.

The most recent figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) put the Mail website at 17,972,153 unique users to the Guardian’s 18,703,811.

• Poll: Is the new Daily Mail beta website an improvement?
• How sticky are UK newspaper sites? 62.8 per cent of users look at just one page, says Alexa
• Sun’s Page 3 widget breaks download records
• Mail Online: Johnston Press chief rules out more paywalls
• How the news sites are treating the phone tapping story

Consumer technology site CNET.co.uk recorded its highest ever audience last year, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe).

Page impressions for the site in during November rose to 18,079,527 – a 156 per cent increase on the same figures taken during November 2006.

In the same month the site attracted 2,539,283 unique users – an increase of 1,195,836 unique users (89 per cent) from the figure recorded in November 2006.

“This audit confirms our leading position in the highly competitive consumer technology space. Our huge growth is testament to the high quality and breadth of content on the site, together with our groundbreaking interactive resources,” said Jason Jenkins, editor of CNET.co.uk, in a press release from CNET Networks UK.

The positive figures for CNET.co.uk came as the site’s US parent company CNET announced it had signed severance packages with several of its board members.

According to a report on Paid Content, Joseph Gillespie, executive vice-president of CNET’s business unit, among others, have signed the agreements, which include compensation for a change in control of the company. The report suggests that this clause is included to address a possible takeover bid by a consortium of investors.

• Shropshire Star posts 59% rise in page impressions
• Shiny Media reports October blog traffic boost
• Welt.de posts record traffic for February
• ABCes: Independent.co.uk records biggest increase in daily browsers
• Editor&Publisher: Soaring web traffic for US newspapers

Here’s a little moment of mirth from the closing session of the Society of Editors conference in Manchester.

During the Q&A session, Media Guardian reporter Jemima Kiss asked Telegraph editor Will Lewis about the transparency of ABCe ‘benchmarking’ monthly web traffic figures and if he was planning to again use Hitwise metric results in Telegraph advertising.

The website had previously run an ad on the homepage quoting Hitwise and proclaiming its position as the top quality UK newspaper online.

The Hitwise metric is considered by some to be an inferior measurement of a websites’ traffic than the figures supplied by Nielsen/NetRatings, comScore or the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).

A visibly riled Lewis told her that Telegraph marketing campaigns were ‘none of her business’ and that the Telegraph site stats were open for all to see on the site.

But what was it that riled him?

Was it the Guardian’s quest to have ABCEs recognised across the industry as the sole measure of websites metrics?

Having it rubbed in that according to this metric the Telegraph trails the Guardian by quite some way, almost in a polar opposite of the print edition?

Or was he tired of the puritanical zeal on this issue that encourages Guardian employees, it seems, to ask him a similar question every time he appears in public?

Listen here to the exchange:

• Guardian: Mirror Group websites join ABCe
• First peek at traffic stats for Times’ new site
• Guardian most popular newspaper website in UK, according to Nielsen Online
• MediaWeek: How long can News International hide its ABCe figures?
• Hitwise: ‘Guardian receives more traffic from Twitter than competitors’