Category Archives: Traffic

Malcolm Coles: Rate of growth slows for newspaper Twitter accounts

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This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ website www.malcolmcoles.co.uk.

National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers for their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1 (when they had 1,471,936).

The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1 per cent, compared with 17 per cent from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.

What’s more, 151,555 of the increase (or 78 per cent of the total) is down to just one account – that of @guardiantech (which owes its popularity to its place on the Twitter Suggested User List). Indeed, of the 131 accounts I’m tracking, 51 have fewer followers than me!

You can see the full table here, or below.

Greenslade: Mirror.co.uk on metrics and building loyal online audiences

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Roy Greenslade reports on Daily Mirror associate editor Matt Kelly’s presentation at this week’s World Editors Forum conference in Prague.

Much has already been made of Mirror.co.uk’s decisions to launch separate sites for its main traffic drivers (Mirrorfootball.co.uk and 3am.co.uk) –  in particular the sites’ attitude towards search engine optimisation (or lack of it).

Speaking at the industry event, Kelly challenged the metrics used to measure web traffic:

“According to Kelly, ‘users’ (a sterile description) are people who discover content through Google, devour it, and then return to their search engine to look for more elsewhere,” writes Greenslade.

As a result users car less about the sites they visit and advertisers are less willing to spend cash to attract them, Kelly added.

“Until we bite the bullet and forget about this mad race for users, and focus instead on building engaged, loyal audiences, we will continue to see the value of our content erode online,” said Kelly, who added that slow growth of engaged audiences should be the aim for news groups online.

Full post at this link…

Twitter tops BBC for monthly traffic, while BBC Online click-throughs exceed 10m

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More than 50 million people used Twitter last month – an increase of more than 7 million from June, according to new data.

The website, which attracted 51.6 million unique users in July, now outranks the BBC and Craigslist in terms of monthly visitors. It has also become one of the top 50 most popular websites in the world, according to the research by comscore.com.

Meanwhile BBC Online’s controller Seetha Kumar reported in a BBC blog post that the number of click-throughs experienced by the site stands at 10-12 million each month.  The blog, posted as a response to the BBC’s first online ‘open meeting’ on August 14, revealed that users were dissatisfied with BBC Online’s use of external links.

Kumar said: “We want to establish new and richer connections to the wider web where they are editorially relevant and meet our public purposes. We know that our users want us to do this and it’s a process that we take very seriously”

Peter Preston: Advertisers needs transparency in metrics to move online

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“[P]art of the answer to not enough advertising revenue lies in serving the advertiser better,” writes Preston, referencing last week’s results of an inquiry into reporting of newspaper bulks as a step towards greater transparency of circulation figures.

But there isn’t an international standard for web traffic measurement to news sites and the difference between current methodologies (e.g. those of Nielsen in the US and the Audit Bureau of Circulations in the UK) could leave advertisers feeling lost, he says.

“It ought to be simple. The information is there online. But if you can’t extricate it, how do you expect more than a few categories of internet advertising to break through to good prices in great quantity?”

Full post at this link…

Hitwise: More traffic going to content websites than transactional sites

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Hitwise’s Robin Goad takes a look at trends in UK internet visits over the last three years. The figures suggest that traffic to social networking sites, news and media, and entertainment sites is outpacing that to transactional sites e.g. shopping and classifieds sites.

“[J]ust because people are using the web more, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are spending more money online,” he writes.

Full analysis and charts at this link…

How sticky are UK newspaper sites? 62.8 per cent of users look at just one page, says Alexa

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This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website, and first appeared here. You can read other posts by Coles on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog at this link.

Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa [click through from chart below]. But 62.8 per cent of users look at just one page.

In terms of daily page views per user, the Sun (4 pages), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) are above average. Visitors to the Mail site look at just 2.4 pages a day – so while the Mail may have come top in the July ABCe figures, maybe its large number of overseas visitors aren’t staying to look round the site.

Newspaper Daily page views
per user		 Bounce
rate (%)
The Sun 4 48.5
Guardian 3.1 59.2
Telegraph 2.9 65.2
Daily Mail 2.4 60.7
Times Online 2.4 59.7
Independent 2.2 70.4
FT.com 1.9 66.8
Mirror 1.7 67.5
Express 1.7 66.7
Average 2.5 62.8
  • Better than average figures are in bold.
  • The bounce rate is the percentage of visits that consisted of just one page (so a low number is good).
  • These figures are 3-month averages. These change on a daily basis at Alexa – so they may have altered slightly by the time you check. Click the papers’ names to see the current data.
  • The overall average at the bottom is a simple average – it has not been weighted by traffic.

Page views vs bounce rate
The table is ranked by daily page views per user. The bounce rate is another measure of stickiness. It doesn’t exactly correlate with page views, as papers may have differing proportions of loyal, engaged users who visit lots of pages. The more pages that these users visit, the better the page view figure – but they won’t affect the bounce rate.

The Telegraph has a worse bounce rate than the sites near it in the table, perhaps because the great success with its Digg tool doesn’t always lead to multi-page visits?

Using Alexa data
There are issues with using Alexa data like this as it underrepresents UK users, who may have differing usage patterns to other visitors. However, as it seems to underrepresent them more or less equally, the rankings should be ok, even if the absolute figures are all out by the same margin.

Oh, and all the papers are doing better than me! Visitors to my own blog look at 1.5 pages a day and I have a 76 per cent bounce rate (which gets a bit worse when I publish things like Tweets people pray their bosses doesn’t see).

Malcolm Coles: How US traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites

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This is a cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website. You can read other posts by Coles on the Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog at this link.

The latest figures for UK users from the audited ABCes together with Compete‘s figures for American site usage show how USA traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites.

On average, US traffic is 36.8 per cent of the UK traffic (i.e. there is just over one US visitor for every 3 UK visitors). The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5 per cent) and for the Mail it’s a massive 62.5 per cent.

Newspaper
site		 USA
visitors
(Compete)		 UK
visitors
(ABCe)		 US users
as % of UK
Daily Mail 5,199,078 8,316,083 62.5
Telegraph 4,087,769 9,184,082 44.5
Times Online 2,805,815 7,668,637 36.6
Guardian 3,676,498 10,211,385 36.0
Independent 1,317,298 3,781,320 34.8
The Sun 2,419,319 8,704,036 27.8
Mirror 748,098 4,907,540 15.2
FT.com 5,960,589 n/a n/a
Express 63,216 n/a n/a
Average 2,919,742 7,539,012 36.8

These figures are all for June 2009. The FT wasn’t audited in June’s ABCes. The Express isn’t in the ABCes.

They are further proof that the Mail’s success in the June ABCes was driven by American searches for Michael Jackson’s kids.

Malcolm Coles: Michael Jackson’s kids made the Daily Mail the most visited UK newspaper site in June

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This is an edited cross-post from Malcolm Coles’ personal website:

The Daily Mail surprisingly overtook the Telegraph and Guardian in the June ABCes – with more unique visitors than any other UK newspaper.

However it was only 4th in terms of UK visitors. Figures from Compete.com, which tracks Americans’ internet use, suggest that, of the 4.7 million unique users the Mail added from May to June, 1.2 million were from the USA. American and other foreign visitors searching for Michael Jackson’s kids – the Mail tops google.com for a search on this – drove this overseas growth.

US traffic to UK newspaper sites
This is what happened to US traffic for the ‘big three’ UK newspaper websites from May to June, according to Compete.com’s figures:

This dramatic increase in traffic, compared to its rivals, from May to June helps explains how the Mail leapfrogged the Guardian and Telegraph.

Traffic leapt from May to July

Google.com was the main referrer to the Mail – responsible for 22.7 per cent of its traffic. More on this below. Next up was drudgereport.com [a large US news aggregation site], followed by Yahoo.com and Facebook.com.

What was behind this rise in US traffic?
So what led to this sudden increase for the Mail? Compete also shows you the main search terms that lead US visitors to sites.

Top five search terms that lead US visitors to the Guardian

  • Guardian/the guardian: 2.6 per cent
  • Michael Jackson: 0.9 per cent
  • Swine flu symptoms: 0.6 per cent
  • Susan Boyle: 0.6 per cent

Top five search terms that lead US visitors to the Telegraph

  • Michael Jackson: 2.5 per cent
  • Susan Boyle: 0.8 per cent
  • Swine flu symptoms: 0.7 per cent
  • Daily Telegraph: 0.6 per cent
  • Michael Jackson children: 0.5 per cent

Top five search terms that lead US visitors to the Daily Mail

  • Daily Mail/Dailymail: 9.9 per cent
  • Michael Jackson (or Jackson’s) children: 2.9 per cent
  • Michael Jackson’s kids: 1.3 per cent

What does this tell us?The main keywords driving US search traffic to the Mail
The Guardian’s top five search terms, as suggested by Compete.com, accounted for just 4.7 per cent of its search traffic. The Telegraph’s top five for 5.1 per cent.

But the Mail’s top 5 accounted for a massive 14.1 per cent – split between searches for its brand name and for Michael Jackson’s kids (and outside the top five there may have been many other MJ-related terms).

Its search traffic in June is heavily skewed to these two search terms in the USA – and elsewhere in the world, I think it’s reasonable to presume.

Can this last?
Searches in the USA for ‘Daily Mail’ have been fairly consistent over the last few months according to Google Insights. I don’t know why so many people do this compared to other newspapers.

But I do know that interest in Michael Jackson’s kids is going to die down. This graph shows how there was a huge and sudden surge in searches for his children and kids after he died. The graph shows just two search terms – there are likely to be many others, and so a significant proportion of the Mail’s overseas traffic increase is down to search terms related to Jackson’s offspring.

Searches for Michael Jackson and kids/children shot up

This increase in searches translates into traffic for the Mail because it is currently TOP for a search on ‘Michael Jackson children’ at google.com and 3rd for kids (it’s also top in Google India for a search on his children, and India is the next most common source of traffic to the Mail after the UK and USA).

So all this data suggests that the Mail’s top spot in June’s ABCes is built on US and other worldwide search traffic around Jackson’s children – the massive peak in late June and again around his funeral in early July.

Once people stop searching for these terms, this traffic will disappear. The Mail may still top July’s ABCes on the back of this traffic – but it’s hard to believe it will still be top in August.

Methodology
You can, of course, pick holes in this argument.

The three MJ’s kids search terms account for 4.2 per cent of Google traffic, which accounts for 22.7 per cent of 5.2 million visitors – so about 50,000 users.

But I think it’s reasonable to assume that there are more search terms outside the top five; there are other search engines; and that the other sources of traffic, such as people sharing links on Facebook and news aggregators, will also partially be about Jackson’s children.

Plus this is the only publicly available data that I’m aware of, and this is the story it seems to be telling.

Silicon Alley Insider: Should web stats lead editorial decisions?

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An interesting follow-up on an article earlier this week by the New York Observer, which looked at how the New York Times’ home page ‘gets made’.

In the piece, the Times’ digital news editor Jim Roberts said the site’s editors do not rely upon web traffic stats to decide what goes on the homepage.

Silicon Alley Insider disputes this – reporters don’t necessarily need to be aware of the traffic their stories get, it says, but web editors must pay attention to the clicks:

  • “It’s the main way readers can show what kinds of stories they care about.
  • “The New York Times is a deeply-in-debt, for-profit enterprise that needs to grow its traffic online in order to survive. Web editors should not pretend that it doesn’t matter how many ad impressions the Times serves each day.”

Full post at this link…

What’s the right balance?

CNET: Traffic surge to news sites as web holds (just) for Jackson memorial

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CNET has a great overview of the traffic surge to news sites caused by coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial last night.

According to the report, Ustream, which provided livestreaming of the event in partnership with CBS, said it was the largest ever event hosted on the service with 4.6 million streams and 12,000 messages posted every minute to the chatrooms surrounding the streams.

[Also see Lost Remote’s post on MSNBC.com’s aggregation of tweets around its livestream]

Figures from web usage monitoring company Gomez International suggest news sites were less available, because of the slowdown caused by video streaming, with some taking nearly triple the time to load pages.