The Telegraph’s website gets eight per cent of its traffic from sites like Digg, delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, its head audience development, Julian Sambles, has said.
According to Coles’ calculations, this amounts to around 75,000 unique visitors a day gained through social sites.
Search engines are responsible for around 300,000 daily uniques, Sambles added. Earlier this year Sambles discussed the site’s search strategy at an Association of Online Publishers forum (AOP).
The latest ‘Twackdown’ seems unlikely to be the end of the Telegraph-Guardian or, to be absolutely fair, Guardian-Telegraph frictions.
After all, in just under an hour we’ll know who is top of the ABCe pops for this month…
So, this week’s Twitterfall spat from Malcolm Coles: ‘That Shane Richmond / Charles Arthur Twackdown in full’.
Guardian technology editor Charles Arthur has the last word [to date] in a comment beneath the post: “I’d only point out that this was a far more multidimensional discussion than this portrays.”
Another row a’brewing with this? The Guardian reports ‘anger’ at the Telegraph over Guido’s Spectator article.
(And while we’re on Guido, it’s interesting to note that Guido himself was in the Guardian building this week – via Jon Slattery)
Update: In the March 2009 ABCe audit, as released at midday, the Telegraph tops the table of six national newspaper titles with the highest number of unique users, followed in second place by the Guardian.
Malcolm Coles has created a ‘linking-out denial’ scale – so, where do you site? At number two, ‘Add URLs but don’t make them hyperlinks’, or have you reached the enlightenment of number 8, ‘Making linking part & parcel of what I do’.
Interesting to see that Malcolm Coles’ recent blog post, which highlighted newspapers’ terms and conditions forbidding linking from their websites, has resulted in some action – outlined in the comments below the post.
Ian Douglas, head of digital production at Telegraph.co.uk says:
“Thanks for pointing this out. As you saw, we deleted it as soon as we heard about it. I’m afraid it say more about the relevance of Ts and Cs than the various papers’ attitude to linking.”
David Black, group director of digital publishing at Trinity Mirror, writes:
“Malcolm, Thanks for spotting this – it’s being fixed for Mirror.co.uk.”
Malcolm Coles has now followed up with another post – what other sites have these kinds of T&Cs banning links to their site? Full post at this link.
Also reproduced at the OnlineJournalismBlog, Malcolm Coles’ post looks at how some UK newspapers have gone so far with their site terms and conditions that ‘you’re not allowed to link to – or even read – their website.’
Some quick analysis over at Malcolm Coles’ blog, suggests that Times Online is the most popular UK national newspaper when it comes to article-sharing/bookmarking on StumbleUpon.