Category Archives: Traffic

NewsLabs closes as founders admit overestimating potential

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It appears that journalism startup NewsLabs, which created the NewsTilt platform, has been closed by its founders.

NewsTilt, which we reported on in April, aimed to provide a space where journalists could publish their work and increase direct interaction with readers.

But the founders have reportedly now put the site into “hibernation”.

According to internal emails from founders Nathan Chong and Paul Biggar, published by PoynterOnline, the pair suffered a “difficult post-launch period” which they felt they could not recover from.

In his message, Chong reportedly says they overestimated what they could achieve.

As I’m sure you’ve noticed not much has been happening with the site recently. I’m very sorry to report that this is because NewsLabs is ending.

(…) I now believe that we should never have made promises about building your online brand or large amounts of traffic (early email threads about how to deal with large number of comments now seem very ironic). If I could rewind and start again then I believe the pitch for NewsLabs should have been simpler and much more realistic: we will build you a technology platform and strive to work hard for you as programmers… but we cannot magically generate you an online brand or guarantee traffic.

Biggar then adds his apologies to those involved in the project.

I’d like to chime in with my own apologies. I had high hopes for NewsLabs and NewsTilt, and am sorry we weren’t able to follow up on our promises.

In a message sent to members last night, Biggar confirms the rumours and says he will give more details soon.

We have indeed shut down; I apologize you heard it elsewhere, but we weren’t really ready to announce it widely when it was reported. I’m writing a piece about how and why we shut it down; needless to say its not a simple explanation, but a summary is: we realized it wasn’t going to work. I’m hopefully going to post the retrospective in a couple of days.

Requests for comment direct from the founders have so far not been answered.

How ‘evergreen topic pages’ can bolster AdSense revenue

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“Evergreen topic pages” – it’s a phrase which confused many when first used on the Online Journalism Review site.

Aiming to clarify the term and show how such pages will contribute revenue, Robert Niles has posted an explanation on the site.

The page does focus on a single theme. But neither a niche website nor a topic index on a general news website necessarily serves the function of an evergreen topic page. A optimized evergreen topic page ought to focus on a single element within a theme – not just sports, for example, but on soccer officiating in the World Cup.

I understand why this might be a tough concept for some news veterans. After all, what I’m asking you to create is in several ways the opposite of what we do on a daily basis writing for newspapers or broadcast reports. This is a different product for a news organization, but one much closely aligned with its core mission than fake front pages or coupon deals.

He explained that such pages are an aside to daily news updates, but can be used to supplement such coverage throughout time, with links to ‘evergreen’ topic pages which provide background information. The pages continue to fulfil online searches and provide a long-term additional income from advertising with limited maintenance.

I stumbled onto the value of evergreen content pages when I wrote my “statistics every writer should know” tutorial in 1996. I added AdSense ads to that site in 2003 and continue to earn several hundred dollars a month from those pages today.

Read the full post here…

paidContent:UK: How BBC News and Drudge send UK newspapers traffic

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Data from the Newspaper Marketing Agency, turned into an interactive graphic by paidContent:UK, suggests that the Drudge Report and BBC News are two of the top traffic drivers to UK commercial newspaper websites.

The BBC News site referred 1,992,425 unique users to the papers’ websites in April, according to the figures.

Google dominates the search referrals list, directing 39,694,597 unique users to the sites. While Twitter is yet to make the top 10 of sites referring traffic to newspapers, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg are all up there.

Full chart and stats at this link…

First peek at traffic stats for Times’ new site

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New figures released by intelligence service Hitwise show that traffic to the Times’ new site, thetimes.co.uk, has halved in the last week, following the closure of timesonline.co.uk.

The drop also ties in with the introduction of user registration in preparation for the paywall.

On Wednesday, the title’s market share of UK internet visits was down to 1.81 per cent, less than half its average during May.

The average session time has also fallen from five and a half minutes, to three, which Hitwise research director Robin Goad says is better than first thought.

That figure is actually higher than many people would have expected, given that a lots of visitors will be spending very little time there if they are choosing not to register.

Over the last month, the title’s market share has also dropped to 2.67 per cent in the week ending 19 June, compared to 4.37 per cent during the week ending 22 May.

The Times’ new registration site, MyTimes+ was the top visited site after thetimes.co.uk.

It’s a chance to see first traffic statistics for the soon-to-be paywalled site, which were not released with other UK national newspaper website figures in the ABCe audit for May.

Goad concludes:

It’s still early days, but the conclusion so far seems to be this: since it forced users to register in order to view its content, the Times has lost market share. However, this decline has clearly not been catastrophic and none of the paper’s rivals has particularly benefitted. Yet. The real test will come when people actually have to pay rather than simply register to view the Times’ content.

See the figures in full here…

‘The Battle of Bandwidth’: Online publishers at risk from ISP pricing changes

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Interesting blog from the Online Journalism Review site, about the dangers to online publishers if internet service providers (ISPs) adapt pricing models based on usage.

According to the author Robert Niles, “the next great battle in the journalism industry will be the Battle of Bandwidth”.

Internet Service Providers clearly don’t want to continue offering a one-price-buys-everything option. ISPs have shown that they favor a pricing model where certain users have to pay more to use more bandwidth. While there’s some logical appeal to the idea of making the heaviest users of the Internet pay the most for their use, metered traffic online creates profound challenges for online content producers.

He concludes his blog with a plea to online publishers to support calls for the government to subsidise increased bandwidth for all.

Access to bandwidth is the issue that will nurture, or kill, online news and information businesses in the years to come. If you’re publishing online, you need to fight for your access to bandwidth – and your potential audience’s access to it, as well.

See the full article here…

US news publisher tracks users’ online reading to offer personalised content

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US-based ImpreMedia, the largest Hispanic print and online news publisher in America, has enlisted the help of behavioural tracking technology to better understand its online users.

The company will use DailyMe’s Newstogram platform to find out exactly what their users are reading online and then use the information to offer personalised news and “better understand their audience when comes to content, e-commerce and advertising”.

DailyMe said in a release that the technology allows online news publishers to “communicate with their readers on an individual level”.

See the full release here….

TechCrunch: HuffPo buys Adaptive Semantics to aid moderation of 100,000 comments a day

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The Huffington Post’s first business acquisition has not brought a blog or media site under its umbrella, reports TechCrunch, but a technology startup.

Adaptive Semantics provides a ‘semantic analysis engine’ already used by HuffPo to help moderate the staggering 100,000 comments posted on the site every day.

“Technology is very critical to us,” says CEO Eric Hippeau. “In this case, the technology has implications for our content. It makes moderation hyper-efficient.” With close to 3 million comments a month, the only way to moderate them is through automation tools (as well as a corp of about 30 professional human moderators).

Full story at this link…

NYTimes.com most visited newspaper site in US last month

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NYTimes.com was the most visited newspaper site in the US last month, according to statistics released by comScore.

The New York Times website had more than 32 million visitors and 719 million page views in May, with the average visitor to the site viewing 22 pages of content.

A short way behind was Tribune Newspapers, with 24.8 million visitors.

Jeff Hackett, comScore senior vice president, says the numbers prove online news is the future.

“The good news for publishers is that even as print circulation declines, Americans are actually consuming as much news as ever – it’s just being consumed across more media,” he said. “The internet has become an essential channel in the way the majority of Americans consume news content today with nearly three out of five internet users reading newspapers online each month.”

See the full statistics here.

Brand Republic: FT withdraws from ABCe audits for web traffic

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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…

NYT: Will an obsession with SEO kill off the clever headline?

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Is search engine optimisation ringing the death knell for the poetry of headline writing? Successful web headlines are, according to New York Times blogger David Carr, a “long way from the poetics of the best of print headlines”. But, he goes on to argue, there is a middle ground between the witty headline aimed at a thinking brain and the information stuffed headline aimed at a processing algorithm. And while Carr’s own headline – “Taylor Momsen Did Not Write This Headline” – does not quite stand up in the information delivery stakes, it does score pretty high on both wit and SEO.

Don’t know who Taylor Momsen is? Neither do I, beyond that she is the mean one on “Gossip Girl.” But Facebook knows her well, Twitter loves her, and she and Google have been hooking up, like, forever.

One more fact about Ms. Momsen: she has nothing to do with this column, let alone the headline. But her very name is a prized key word online — just the thing to push my column to the top of Google rankings.

Full post at this link…