Tag Archives: the Telegraph

New study measures social media success of national newspapers

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This week Martin Belham, of Currybet.net, released his study into the nationals newspapers’ use of web 2.0 tools, such as news aggregation and social media sites.

His aim was this:

“I wanted to examine, firstly, how well British newspaper content was performing on prominent social media sites, and secondly, see if there was any correlation between the placement of icons, widgets and links, and the presence of newspaper content on these services. In short, I wanted to measure UK newspaper success with social media services.”

In order to do this he monitored eight popular social bookmarking and link sharing sites for a month, checking for the presence of UK newspaper URLs on their front or most ‘popular’ pages. Between July 15 and August 14 he counted just over 900 URLs from 12 major newspapers across the services (the Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Star, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Mirror, News Of The World, The Scotsman, The Sun, The Telegraph and The Times)

Here’s a peek at some of the findings:

  • The Telegraph was the most successful UK newspaper in this study, with 243 prominent URLs on social media sites between July 15 and August 14 2008.
  • The poorest performances amongst the nationals were from the Daily Star (4 links), and the Daily Express and The Mirror (3 links each)
  • The correlation between having an ‘icon’ or ‘button’ for a specific social media service, and success on that service appears to be weak or non-existent.

The full study can be downloaded from here, for £25.

Newspaper Society: Belfast Telegraph sees traffic surge after online revamp

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The Belfast Telegraph recorded a 29 per cent week-on-week growth in traffic to its website following a relaunch of the site on July 14.

As part of the redesign the Telegraph is now using a tri-site platform: it will feature content from sister titles the Independent and the Irish Independent.

New comment functions on articles have also been added to increase interactivity with users.

Telegraph.co.uk redesign: engagement above traffic?

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Speaking at yesterday’s preview of the Telegraph.co.uk redesign, both chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough and digital editor Edward Roussel said the new site was aimed at ‘deeper engagement’ with users.

Both declined to comment on whether the new site would bring success in terms of ABCe figures, even suggesting the amount of content/page views per user was more important at this stage than an increased numbers of visitors.

“If we have doubled the amount of content that each person is consuming [by the end of the year] then that’s great,” said Roussel.

The current average for the site is 16 page views per person per month, he added.

A raft of improvements have been made in the new design to address the issue of engagement. Firstly improved search and navigation features to help users find the content they are after more quickly and keep them on the site.

Changes to the site’s servers have also been implemented with a series of international servers set up so the experience of accessing the site is the same wherever you are, Cheesbrough explained.

These changes were made necessary after ‘power outages’ on the site last year, which brought Telegraph.co.uk down for prolonged periods. In contrast the site is now the fastest news site behind the BBC, Cheesbrough claimed.

One of the most significant changes for me – and the one which lends itself most immediately to both engagement and traffic goals – is an increase in embedded video.

Following hot on the heels of the BBC and FT, who have both made the move to embedded video, the new Telegraph.co.uk will embed its video content within articles across the site and lose the standalone Telegraph TV player box on the homepage.

The BBC’s Pete Clifton told Journalism.co.uk previously that the conversion rate – the number of people reading the text article and viewing the video footage – was around 40 per cent for embedded video and only 2 per cent when video was housed in a separate player.

Initial trials of embedding on Telegraph.co.uk have produced similarly positive results, said Cheesbrough, with a 30 per cent conversion rate for embedded videos compared to a 3 per cent rate for Telegraph TV.

It’s a logical progression that boosts views and keeps the user engaged for longer, and is part of what the team behind the Telegraph redesign refer to as ‘the concept of the article as the homepage’.

This shows an awareness that the homepage is no longer the main point of entry – around half of the site’s traffic comes through aggregators. Putting as much effort into the design and accessibiilty of every page of your site, as most publications put into their homepage, could well be a winning strategy for both traffic and engagement.

Telegraph.co.uk inserting keywords to drive traffic?

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Simon Collister has blogged about Telegraph.co.uk’s rising web traffic making it into this month’s Private Eye.

The Eye apparently writes:

“[Telegraph] news hacks are sent a memo three or four times a day from the website boffins listing the top subjects being searched in the last few hours on Google. They are then expected to write stories accordingly and/or get as many of those key words into the first par of their story.”

(Shades of the England football team inserting song lyrics into post-match interviews under Glen Hoddle…)

As this appears in Private Eye the usual caveats apply, but similar practices at the Telegraph have been suggested by the Observer’s media diary:

“The Daily Telegraph has been accused of inserting keywords into copy to ensure its website gets the maximum number of hits, so it was interesting to see the following comment on telegraph.co.uk, posted in response to a rather dry piece about civil liberties penned by advertising guru Maurice Saatchi. ‘Dear Mr Saatchi,’ it began. ‘Your sister-in-law [ie Nigella Lawson] is second only to Holly Willoughby in my affections.’ You may wonder what the photogenic TV star has to do with 42-day detention periods, but it can’t harm the traffic figures.”

Is the Eye onto something or is this just another Guardian-Telegraph conspiracy theory?

Telegraph news recruits need to be commercially focused too, says new media director

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The world is becoming more commercial, so Telegraph editorial recruits have to reflect this shift, Alison Reay, director of new media, told an Association of Online Publishers (AOP) forum yesterday.

The integration of the Telegraph’s newsroom, she added, created a multimedia hub for the paper’s commercial interests as well as for editorial.

“People recruited in the last six to 12 months are a lot more commercially focused… It is all about how you bring the commercial and the journalists together,” she said.

Channel managers have been appointed to the newsroom to bridge this gap between commercial and editorial online. These have ‘profit and loss very close to their hearts’ without any specific revenue targets placed on them, Reay said.

For the Telegraph these roles are about finding new ways to integrate advertising online – avoiding the tradition advertorial and without compromising editorial values of the content.

“Our job as publishers is to provide an audience. But should we be judged by the number of people clicking through?” asked Reay.

Part of this – in terms of video content – has been offering in-house ad production, which has seen the publisher embark on collaborative ad production with brands and agencies.

In addition the paper has used its journalists’ existing strengths, turning them from ‘columns to camera’ to make video content a more attractive avenue for advertisers and more cost-effective for the publisher, Reay added.

Guardian publishes string of anti-Telegraph stories – cue spat

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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

Guardian most popular newspaper website in UK, according to Nielsen Online

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Some significant differences between the figures for unique users visiting UK newspaper sites released by Nielsen Online today and those announced by the Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) last week.

While both rank the Guardian as the most popular in the UK, Nielsen’s figures suggest the site attracted 3 million unique users in the UK in April compared to 7,762,826 recorded by the ABCe.

The Telegraph attracted 2.7 million UK uniques in April, according to Nielsen – around 3.5 million less than the figure reported by the ABCe.

By the Nielsen figures the Sun attracted 1.9 million UK unique users, the Times 1.8 million and the Daily Mail 1.7 million over the same period.

Nielsen calculates its traffic figures using a panel-based method called NetView, which the company describes as ‘around 45,000 UK internet users who have opted in to download a meter which records all their PC, online and application usage on a continual and ongoing basis.’

In contrast, websites register themselves with the ABCe, which then audits data on web traffic recorded by the sites.

Very different methods – very different results.

Interestingly Nielsen also provides data on the ‘engagement’ of UK unique users with a site, differentiating between ‘heavy’ (>15 minutes), ‘medium'(>5 – >=15 minutes) and ‘light'(<=5 minutes) users.

The results of this analysis suggest the most popular online newspapers – the Guardian and Telegraph – have the highest percentage of light visitors (with 83%and 81% respectively).

The results for engagement in full:

Sun: 14% heavy, 16% medium, 70% light
Times: 13% heavy, 17% medium, 70% light
Daily Mail: 12% heavy, 14% medium,75% light
Telegraph: 7% heavy, 12% medium, 81% light
Guardian: 6% heavy, 11% medium, 83% light

The figures suggest that the Times is the only title to have gained in ‘heavy’ users since January 2008, while the Telegraph has recorded the biggest increase in ‘light’ users over the same period.

As Stephen Brooks, UK managing director for Nielsen Online, pointed out in the release: “Analysing the Telegraph’s audience by heavy, medium and light visitors reveals their dramatic growth in popularity is concentrated around light users, which could be due to the site’s improved visibility in search results,”

“This encapsulates the ‘reach vs engagement’ conundrum that newspaper sites face – is the best path to financial success attracting the most visitors or having a smaller core of more engaged users?”

Media Guardian: Anti-immigrant BNP member blogging on Telegraph

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Richard Barnbrook, the British National Party’s London Assembly member, has used the paper’s MyTelegraph platform to publish an anti-immigrant blog post.

A spokeswoman for the Telegraph said the presence of the post on the site did not mean the paper endorsed Barnbrook’s arguments and that readers are relied upon to report offensive material.

“Our readers are entitled to their opinions and, within the law, they’re entitled to publish them on the My Telegraph blogging platform,” she said.

Google Zeitgeist videos: Salman Rushdie, Chad Hurley, Gordon Brown, Will Lewis, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey…many more

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Google has just held its two day European Zeitgeist conference in the UK bringing together a host of captivating speakers, here are just a few of the session videos – many more on the Zeitgeist YouTube channel.

Matthew d’Ancona interviews Chad Hurley

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KA_Lw9zCT2E]

Sir Salman Rushdie

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ka1Y1BY19Vw]

The future of online video panel with Ashley Highfield and others
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKmsUWuh0CU]

Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acoC5zjgM0]

Content vs community panel part 1 (Inc. Mattias Cohler, Facebook, & William Lewis, editor of The Telegraph)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7awAN8ceIgc]

Content vs community part 2

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aan24cfI1bg]