In a press release issued yesterday the BBC announced the latest traffic statistics for BBC.com, which was said to have recorded 15 million unique users across Europe in the first quarter of the year.
Figures relating to accessing BBC news on mobile devices were also reported, with visits of “around 8.5 million users” across the world visiting the BBC News websites and apps on mobiles or tablets “in an average month”.
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”.
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.
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:
LinkedIn has also released impressive web traffic figures and financial results:
The results represent LinkedIn’s first quarter as a public company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Audited data for online traffic to Australia’s newspapers and magazines will be produced by the end of the year.
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 blog