The top six performing regional news websites are all owned by the same publisher, today’s ABC figures have revealed.
The sextet of Trinity Mirror sites all saw a rise of more than 60pc year-on-year in the number of daily unique average browsers for the period January to June 2015.
The Liverpool Echo’s website saw the largest increase at 90.1pc.
The sites of The Newcastle Chronicle at 87.5pc, Teesside Gazette at 79.5pc, Manchester Evening News at 74.8pc and Birmingham Mail at 71.6pc came next.
Wales Online at 61.6pc, which incorporates the South Wales Echo and Western Mail, completed the six.
Local World titles The Sentinel, Stoke, and the Bristol Post had the next best performing websites.
Overall, the Trinity Mirror network recorded the highest number of daily unique browsers with 2,069,527, though a year-on-year comparison was not published.
Of the publishers was which such data was available, the KM Group’s Kent Online network saw the biggest increase with a 59.5pc rise.
Newsquest sites saw a 35.5pc increase, while Local World at 35.1pc, Johnston Press at 21.3pc and the Midlands News Associaton at 14.8pc also saw rises.
Only five regional newspaper websites – The Peterborough Telegraph, The Herald, Yorkshire Post, Scotsman and Coventry Telegraph – saw decreases in the number of daily unique browsers.
Of these, the largest decreases were at The Scotsman and Coventry Telegraph, with declines of 33.5pc and 35.9pc respectively.
The full list of audience figures for regional publisher online platforms is as follows:
Total | Y-on-Y % | |
Kent Online (KM Group) network | 105,696 | 59.5 |
Newsquest | 1,269,287 | 35.5 |
Local World Network | 1,228,953 | 35.1 |
Johnston Network | 972,454 | 21.3 |
Midland News Association Network | 164,511 | 14.8 |
Trinity Mirror Regional Network | 2,069,527 | N/A |
The full list of audience figures for newspaper online platforms is as follows:
Total | Y-on-Y % | |
Liverpool Echo | 467,766 | 90.1 |
Newcastle Chronicle | 218,334 | 87.5 |
Teesside Gazette | 94,144 | 79.5 |
Manchester Evening News | 573,342 | 74.8 |
Birmingham Mail | 212,911 | 71.6 |
Wales Online | 261,553 | 61.6 |
The Sentinel, Stoke | 70,171 | 50.7 |
Bristol Post | 88,502 | 48.4 |
Derby Telegraph | 73,563 | 46.9 |
Southern Daily Echo | 81,636 | 46.4 |
The Northern Echo | 63,936 | 45.6 |
News Shopper | 35,241 | 44.7 |
Scunthorpe Telegraph | 29,862 | 44.2 |
Sunderland Echo | 46,465 | 44 |
Glasgow Evening Times | 48,431 | 41.9 |
Leicester Mercury | 69,276 | 40.8 |
The Bolton News | 50,249 | 40.5 |
The Star, Sheffield | 62,317 | 38.7 |
South Wales Evening Post | 56,433 | 38.6 |
Hull Daily Mail | 85,727 | 37.9 |
Plymouth Herald | 76,255 | 37.6 |
Bradford Telegraph & Argus | 61,588 | 36.2 |
Gloucester Citizen/Gloucestershire Echo | 34,610 | 35.6 |
Nottingham Post | 72,511 | 35.3 |
Lancashire Evening Post | 28,356 | 30.5 |
Grimsby Telegraph | 39,122 | 29.9 |
The Argus, Brighton | 51,086 | 27 |
Lancashire Telegraph | 47,716 | 26.7 |
Swindon Advertiser | 31,150 | 25.9 |
Shropshire Star | 49,938 | 19 |
Cambridge News | 47,537 | 17.9 |
The News, Portsmouth | 44,919 | 17.4 |
Yorkshire Evening Post | 69,901 | 13.6 |
Oxford Mail | 30,368 | 13.6 |
Express & Star, Wolverhampton | 119,683 | 12.7 |
The Press, York | 44,244 | 11.3 |
Lincolnshire Echo | 23,795 | 5.9 |
The Gazette, Blackpool | 30,563 | 3.5 |
Peterborough Telegraph | 18,927 | -0.1 |
The Herald, Glasgow | 84,503 | -3.7 |
Yorkshire Post | 25,615 | -10.6 |
The Scotsman | 106,510 | -33.5 |
Coventry Telegraph | 58,966 | -35.9 |
Less than 1,000,000 for all of the Johnston Press titles… That is a figure that should make all JP bosses hang their heads in shame.
And the window of opportunity has long gone now… They started taking the internet seriously 10 years too late.
All that’s left now is consolidation and then termination
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Sad to see the Coventry Telegraph at the very bottom of the table, but thankfully David Higgerson has already explained the reasons behind this.
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No Archant figures?
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Local World could have double the figures if they got rid of their aggressive and counter productive advertising policy, all the comments I’ve seen on this suggest most people click straight off an article whenever a pop up comes into view.
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Frankly, until someone comes up with an effective method of turning unique visitors into a substantial source of cash, this is all meaningless.
It is, in essence, the same as Brighton City Council loudly trumpeting every year how many pebbles it has on its beaches. Since nobody gives a tinker’s cuss how many more pebbles are on the beaches, it would be pointless to announce it, just as it is pointless to crack open the Asti Spumanti every time a few hundred people click on a website that adds a fraction of a penny to the bottom line.
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Dave is spot-on about Local World. People complain in their droves at the pop-up ads blocking the text they really want to read (would papers overlay news stories with ads?) and many never return. And who ever remembers the company advertised? Exactly. UGC is also right on a subject that will get me banned from here for being boring if I go on about it again – but the figures are meaningless in commercial terms. If people drift around your lovely department store and never put their hands in their pockets what is the point of them even being there? If every unique visitor was even worth just 10p in measurable return, fair enough. But they’re not and never will be.
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To quite Jack Nicholson from As Good as It Gets: “I’d be the luckiest man alive if that did it for me.”
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Good point about the department store Dick Minim.
It is similar to what I have been thinking for years.
If I opened a pub offering free beer I would expect to have plenty of people turning up to take advantage but the business would soon go bust.The problem is that the internet business model at groups like Archant is deeply flawed. They have been banging on about it for well over 10 years and still have to find a winning formula. Yet still the same old faces tell us it is the golden goose. Those who have been pushing it for years without coming up with any meaningful solutions to monetise it should get out. If it was going to take off it would have taken off by now.
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But Dick, the websites do make money. Millions of pounds, and growing every month. It doesn’t cover the decline in print but they do make money. The challenge is make sure they make enough money to ensure local journalism survives because if they don’t, local journalism dies. So the numbers aren’t meaningless, unlike the misinformed speculation which I hope one day does get you banned from here.
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User generated Content: “Frankly, until someone comes up with an effective method of turning unique visitors into a substantial source of cash, this is all meaningless.”
Hits the nail on the head. If you can’t increase a web audience when you are giving the site away for free, you can advertise the site for free in your own printed products and the market keeps growing as more people embrace the technology, then something is very, very wrong.
Bigger audiences without substantially bigger revenue are meaningless.
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Trinity-Mirror have gone all in on the web. It’s working but is it paying off? Nah! Another round of redundancies anyone?
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