Editors' Blog | Journalism.co.uk » online traffic

Nieman: Blogs, SEO chief and Facebook comments result in traffic increase for LA Times

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 16:53:39 +0000

The Los Angeles Times is experiencing an increasing amount of traffic, which Nieman Journalism Lab is attributing to engaging with its audience using its blogs.

In March the site had more than 160 million pageviews; in May it was 189 million, bucking the downward trend of many other major US sites. The Nieman report states:

That doesn’t mean the LA Times is going to lap the New York Times or the Huffington Post when it comes to reader counts. But the numbers are still impressive, and more so when you consider the secret sauce at the heart of it all: a full embrace of blogging that adds voice in some corners, emphasises timeliness in others, and has opened new doors for reader engagement. On latimes.com, news is getting the blog treatment and blogs are getting the news treatment. “Most of our blogs are reported stories,” said Jimmy Orr, managing editor/online for the Times. “What we’re seeing is big increases in our blogs, and that’s where a lot of the breaking news is.

The post goes on to explain some other changes at the LA Times, too. The site has recently added an SEO chief, “who works on the copy desk to optimise headlines” resulting in a “65 per cent rise in traffic from search and a 41 per cent jump in traffic from Google as compared to this time last year”.

Another move by the LA Times is to make the site more social by adding Facebook comments to around 50 per cent of articles, a move that has resulted in a 450 per cent increase in referrals from Facebook, according to Nieman’s post.

It also plans to expand its use of Facebook as a commenting system because of encouraging results it’s seen so far. The goal is a virtuous circle: A bigger community leads to more traffic leads to more impact for the Times’ journalism.

It is worth reading the full post on the LA Times’ traffic report which lists examples of the LA Times blogs, including LA Now, “which looks like a blog, but is actually a driver for breaking news”.

Similar Posts:

Tool of the week for journalists – TwentyFeet, analytics for your site and social networks

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:44:17 +0000

Tool of the week: TwentyFeet

What is it and how is it of use to journalists? TwentyFeet is an analytics platform allowing you to use one site to keep track of your web page impressions, retweets, Facebook likes, YouTube plays and bit.ly shares.

It doesn’t give you stats that you can’t get elsewhere but they are presented in easy-to-read graphs and charts and allow you to see your metrics all in one place.

Sign up and authenticate your Google Analytics, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and bitl.y accounts and TwentyFeet will start gathering your data.

There are various pricing options but there is a free trial and you can track some accounts for free forever.

Similar Posts:

LinkedIn growing by two new members every second

Sarah Marshall — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:24:41 +0000

LinkedIn is growing by two new members every second, according to figures released yesterday (4 August).

Around 14 million people joined the business social network in the three months to 30 June.

That equates to an average of:

156,000 new users every day (new social network Google+ has been growing at a rate of one million new members a day);
6,500 every hour;
108 new members every minute;
1.8 new users every second.

LinkedIn has also released impressive web traffic figures and financial results:

Unique visitors of 81.8 million per month, an increase of 83 per cent from the second quarter of 2010;
Page views of 7.1 billion, an increase of 80 per cent from the second quarter of 2010;
Revenue for the second quarter was $121.0 million, an increase of 120 per cent compared to $54.9 million for the second quarter of 2010.

The results represent LinkedIn’s first quarter as a public company.

Similar Posts:

Poynter: Five ways to turn traffic spikes into return visits

Sarah Marshall — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:33:33 +0000

Poynter has been speaking to US news organisations about how they turn traffic spikes as a result of major news stories into return visits.

Reporter Mallary Jean Tenore spoke to the Orlando Sentinel, msnbc.com and the Arizona Daily Star.

Page views and unique visitors are valuable metrics, but they don’t measure the likelihood that readers will be returning visitors. Here are a few indicators that readers have committed to your content:

1. An increase in Twitter followers and/or Facebook fans;
2. An increase in newsletter subscriptions;
3. If your site has a print publication, an increase in print subscribers;
4. An increase in mobile app downloads.

Tanore gives examples and stats on each based on her interviews with the news organisations and gives the following tips on cultivating new readers:

1. Make it easy for readers to follow your site on Twitter and Facebook;
2. Make it easy for people to subscribe to email newsletters and RSS feeds;
3. Showcase your mobile offerings;
4. Provide readers with unique content they can’t find elsewhere;
5. If readers come to your site through search, offer them a different sidebar.

The post gives examples how the three news organisations have done each of the above in order to turn first-time visitors into loyal readers.

The full post is at this link.Similar Posts:

Mashable: What impact has the NY Times paywall had on traffic?

Sarah Marshall — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 10:45:32 +0000

Mashable has been attempting to discover the impact of the New York Times metered-paywall on web traffic.

It is early days as the wall only went up on 28 March but the analysis suggests a reduction of between five and 10 per cent in traffic and a fall in pageviews by up to 30 per cent.

It is perhaps not surprising that pageviews have taken a greater hit as the metered-paywall model allows readers to access up to 20 articles a month free, so users may be deterred from clicking as many pages .

So here’s the big question: Is NYT’s paywall a success or a failure? When it comes to this big-picture question, we still don’t have enough information to make a conclusion. The paywall simply hasn’t been around long enough and we don’t have the financial data to see whether the paywall has made up for the loss in advertising revenue.

Mashable’s full article is at this link.Similar Posts:

Mediabistro: CJR to investigate magazines’ online problem

Laura Oliver — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 09:03:26 +0000

The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) has received a $230,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation to investigate why magazine websites are struggling to grow online traffic and audiences.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

Cyberjournalist.net: How Hearst Magazine increased traffic 150% with SEO

Laura Oliver — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:37:03 +0000

CJ talks to senior SEO analyst for Hearst, Dan Roberts, about how he helped grow online traffic to the publisher’s website by 150 per cent using SEO and Wordtracker.

Full story at this link…Similar Posts:

The Australian: Australian print media to release web traffic audits by end of year

Laura Oliver — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:53:10 +0000

Audited data for online traffic to Australia’s newspapers and magazines will be produced by the end of the year.Similar Posts:

Guardian publishes string of anti-Telegraph stories – cue spat

Laura Oliver — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:03:58 +0000

While the Daily Mail allegedly has a gentlemen’s agreement with the Telegraph not to write about each other’s parent company, it hardly seems worth pointing out that no such pact exists between the Guardian and the Telegraph online.

Over the last month a series of articles published by Guardian.co.uk has alleged various problems with or criticised Telegraph.co.uk.

The latest links the MyTelegraph section with the BNP for a second time in little over a week, detailing a blog post on the platform by BNP member Richard Barnbrook entitled ‘Blame the immigrants’.

The Guardian first made the connection between the party and MyTelegraph with an article looking into managing online communities that discussed MyT under the provocative headline ‘Platform for free speech … or hate?’ and went on to say one user ‘publishes BNP campaign literature and flyers’ on the site.

On both occasions the Telegraph emphasised the free speech ethos behind MyT, which is policed by readers who are relied upon to report offensive material.

The policy seems to be working – Barnbrook’s post has attracted over 30 comments including several from the hang ‘um and flog ‘um brigade alongside more measured anti-BNP responses.

MyTelegraph’s problems at the end of last year, as the technology firm behind its development went into administration, were also documented recently by the Guardian:

“Telegraph Media Group’s community media site MyTelegraph ‘is on life support’ until it receives an overhaul this summer, the company’s communities editor said today.

“Shane Richmond told the PPA Magazines 2008 conference that the site had suffered periodic downtime, slow page-loads and instability since the company which built it, Interesource, went in to administration late last year.”

I was there, he did say that, but then again he’d already blogged about it months before.

But then again, again. He DID say it, so it’s fair to report him saying it.

In addition to this last month’s ABCe figures showing that the Telegraph site passed the Guardian for the first time to become the UK’s most popular newspaper website in terms of unique users, seem only to have fanned the competitive fire.

The Guardian was the first to delve into the Telegraph’s recent rapid growth in unique users – from 12,283,835 in February to 17,036,081 in March, and 18,646,112 in April – suggesting a switch in internal measurement tools may have prompted the surge.

Continuing the series of pieces on the Telegraph’s online traffic – and there are a few of them now – the Guardian suggests that a review of online traffic measurement announced by JICWEBS last week was sparked by publishers concerns over the Telegraph’s recent growth.

All fair news pieces from the Guardian? Surely there can be no complaint with their reporting factual news? Well, yes there can.

After the publication of the latest Guardian piece today, Telegraph communities editor Shane Richmond came out fighting, accusing the Guardian of hypocrisy and arguing that if the charge leveled at the Telegraph is one of giving a platform to racists and fanatics then it is a charge that could well be applied to the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.

“How about we take the view that when you have an open platform, whether it’s My Telegraph, Comment Is Free, or the internet itself, then you have to accept that a multiplicity of views will be expressed on it and that some of those views will be unpalatable to some people,” he wrote.

“If the Guardian’s attacks on our site are motivated by genuine concern, then they should look closer to home first. However, I suspect that this sustained criticism has more to do with sour grapes over recent audience trends.”

Stories about other publishers are fair game and healthy competition between the titles is to be encouraged.

But take the BNP stories and the numerous stories about the Telegraph’s web advances en masse and one may begin to wonder when healthy news reporting begins to border on the obsessive?

UPDATE – the ‘debate’ continues with a post from Shane Richmond in response to a comment left by Comment is Free editor Matt Seaton on his Telegraph.co.uk blogSimilar Posts:

Online Journalism Scandinavia: Norway’s leading news sites strategies for attracting online audience

Kristine Lowe — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:07:23 +0000

Kristine Lowe is a freelance journalist who writes on the media industry for number of US, UK and Norwegian publications. This week Online Journalism Scandinavia looks at how Norway’s leading news sites attract their audiences.

Schibsted-owned VG’s recipe for success is to give people the diet they had no idea they craved
Norway’s public broadcaster, NRK, wants to make it easier for lazy users to take shortcuts

Frozen pizza with champagne
Schibsted’s idiosyncratic take on newspaper website design recently received mention in this excellent article by the Press Gazette (also check out Mark Comerford’s and Espen Andersen’s thoughts).

However, its VG title is perhaps in a class of its own. It’s Norway’s most read news site with 2.7m unique users and a staggering profit margin of 42 – 45 per cent for the last three years. So the way it structures content is just as, if not more, important and also needs emphasis.

“VG has the world’s ugliest website, but the great thing about it is that it lets you discover things you did not know you were interested in. Other news sites divide their content in neatly defined sections, but we believe that people will drink champagne with frozen pizza if given the choice,”said Torry Pedersen, editor-in-chief of VG online.

“That, if given the choice on the same page, people will want to read both a well argued piece on file-sharing and a story on Britney Spears’ latest escapades.”

To get even more readers to its content VG has also developed Norway’s second biggest social network, Nettby, with 657,000 members. It’s roughly half the size of Facebook in Norway and Schibsted is already in the process of exporting it to its operations in Sweden and Spain.

The world’s laziest anarchy
Despite VG’s dominance, public broadcaster NRK has almost doubled its online traffic in the last year with a 42 per cent increase in unique users – from 651,000 in the first week of 2007, to 1.1m in the fist week of 2008.

(Traffic numbers for both sites from TNS Gallup, which only counts traffic generated by Norway’s 4.7m citizens)

Part of this traffic rise can be attributed to the NRK take on how to best alert people to content they might find interesting.

“The web is the world’s laziest anarchy: people choose the least difficult path. With this in mind, we are working to be present where people are and give them the opportunity to discover us there, which means on Facebook, YouTube and other such places,” said Eirik Solheim, a media developer with NRK’s online team.

“There are three ways to deal with what is happening with social media. You choose not to be present; you choose to make your own services that can compete with Facebook, as VG has been successful with; or you choose to be present where people are to increase familiarity with your brand and strengthen distribution. We see the last option as a great opportunity,” said Bjarne Andre Myklebust, head of NRK’s online division.

Two takes on serendipity
Both news groups’ strategies play to the serendipitous nature of the web, but while VG’s approach is designed to keep readers hooked by satisfying old and newfound appetites on its site, NRK wants to increase your chances of accidentally stumbling across its content.

No doubt, NRK wants those accidental users to linger. So if it keeps its promise to open up more of its archives and make more and more of its content freely and easily available in the places – beyond its own websites – where people hang out online, it will be interesting to see which is the more successful strategy.Similar Posts:

Editor and Publisher: Newsday traffic ahead of WSJ.com

Oliver Luft — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 07:25:53 +0000

‘Newsday’s online traffic edged past The Wall Street Journal Online in the month of December, according to the latest data from Nielsen Online.’Similar Posts: