A regional publisher has announced a record month for four of its regional newspaper websites.
Trinity Mirror revealed June saw the highest number of unique users on its Wales Online, Get Reading, Chester Chronicle and Get Bucks portals.
However, the latest figures published by ABC also show a month-on-month decrease in daily average unique browsers on the websites of six of its other regional titles.
The largest monthly decline in June came at Newcastle daily The Journal’s site, with a 13.1pc drop and 12,727 average users.
Since the figures were compiled, The Journal’s site has been closed by Trinity Mirror, with all web content now being channeled through its city sister title The Chronicle.
There was also a 35.9pc year-on-year decline in traffic on the Coventry Telegraph’s website.
The full available ABC figures for June can be seen in the table below:
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A 90% increase for the Liverpool Echo? Ha! And if my grandmother had wheels she’d be a wagon.
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From the other day, but reposted… as promised when ‘uniques are up’ !
Carrying on from the above as am bored waiting for midnight to see what the days total stats were like.
Try some of these google searches on your fave TM title, or other newspaper titles as most are at it…..
site:liverpoolecho.co.uk “what time” OR “when is”
site:birminghammail.co.uk “what time” OR “when is”
site:dailypost.co.uk “what time” OR “when is”
site:chroniclelive.co.uk “what time” OR “when is”
site:walesonline.co.uk “what time” OR “when is”
site:coventrytelegraph.net “what time” OR “when is”
Some recent topical examples on this traffic play which appears to be run from the Liverpool hub.
http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/wimbledon-2015-andy-murray-back-9554660
what time is andy murray back on
http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/whats-on/film-news/wimbledon-2015-andy-murray-back-9554660
what time is andy murray back on
http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/wimbledon-2015-andy-murray-back-9554660
exact same
http://www.dailypost.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/wimbledon-2015-andy-murray-back-9554660
exact same article
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/whats-on/film-news/wimbledon-2015-andy-murray-back-9554660
exact same
similar stuff, again can be found all over the place:
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/other-sport/tennis/andy-murrays-semi-final-against-roger-9623316
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/sport/other-sport/tennis/andy-murray-playing-wimbledon-wednesday-9609661
The above works and grows traffic as people do search these terms. What is this ‘traffic growth’, and what does it mean to the metrics used to see if a website or digital property is a success?
There are other terms aside from what time / when is etc but these are just examples.
Something to ponder when the pageviews and uniques are up!
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Right, here is the perfect chance for somebody young, clever and digitally minded to explain to an old 18th century scribbler like me exactly how the accounts at TM are impacted by the four titles that have recorded increases. Wales Online, for example, looks good: are the figures for ad sales on that site available; how do they compare to the paper equivalent; and what percentage of TM’s profits do they represent? I don’t want a long debate on analogue vs digital just – after 16 long years trying to get any – some hard figures. I thank you.
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Is there a way of truly measuring digital success? And by ‘success’ that really must include a view on financial performance too.
One other observation that needs a detailed explanation is the incredible peak of the Birmingham Mail in comparison to the alarming decline of the Coventry Telegraph. How can two newspapers in the same stable have such contrasting digital fortunes?
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But what do these ‘record’ figures mean, up or down? You have online sites operating where they closed papers, and mergers of sites and content to take into account.
The only meaningful figures comes from:
1. What is the hard cash revenue and is it enough to sustain the operation?
2. Is there enough reader response to ads so that local advertisers will continue to pay for their flashes and pop ups?
Right now, I think it’s just a load of eyeballs.
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Makes one quite nostalgic for the halcyon days of bulk sales to bump up the numbers which actually matter …. and oh the fun some had with those photos of bundles of frees in skips, down back lanes and in ditches. But at the end of the day someone came up with the revenue figures to measure performance – there was at least some link with the real world offered.
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I’ll mention the elephant in the digital room…ad blockers.
A YouGov survey of 20,000 consumers of digital news in various countries discovered: “We find significant consumer dissatisfaction with online advertising, expressed through the rapid take-up of ad blockers (47% in US and 39% in the UK) and disquiet over the blurring lines between editorial and advertising.”
The report is at http://digitalnewsreport.org/
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To answer a couple of questions on here:
The year on year ‘decline’ at the Coventry Telegraph is due to a story which went viral in the same month in 2014 and alone brought in more visitors than the website would normally attract in a month. We don’t set out to create content that goes viral like that, so there’s not much to read in the year on year decline in Coventry.
Generally, growth is powered by focusing on the best possible coverage of breaking news stories, providing as much football content as possible, generating loads of what’s on material and, yes, writing some content which will appeal to people through search.
The suggestion that our growth is just down to ‘what time is X’ stories is plain wrong. We publish thousands of stories a month on our sites, and these articles make up a tiny percentage of what we publish – but we do tend to find local users are most likely to click on their local site when it comes up as something they’ve searched for.
We use plenty of engagement metrics in our newsrooms to ensure we focus on content which gets people returning regularly, but we’d be foolish to ignore ways of perhaps getting a user in for the first time, and giving ourselves the chance to show new visitors what our sites are about.
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Newspaper execs seem to be living in soon to burst bubble if they think that website hits compensate in some way for lost hard copy sales. It’s a bit like a major supermarket reporting that its sales are down, but rejoicing in the the fact that more people are viewing its website. How many newspapers (increasingly a misnomer of course) could survive without their printed formats? Only a small percentage of advertisers are interested in web-only exposure and most ad sales on newspaper websites are add-ons to print sales.
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Yes Kendo, ad blockers are the way forward. Mine works very well.
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So many people on here willing digital news to fail, but the backup plan of ‘do more in print and make people pay for it’ is a non-starter. It’s probably for the best most clearly haven’t been in a newsroom for years, or if they have, they haven’t been listening.
Ex-ed is probably an ex-ed for a reason. There are many examples of digital news companies making a profit. Newspaper companies need to learn from them. The first lesson is to stop being so nostalgic about the past and give readers what they want. The second lesson is to try new things all the time. There will always be those who carp when things fail, but as many of the commenters on here like to prove, it’s easy to be right when you assume everything will fail, but don’t try anything yourself.
Ad blockers are just another challenge which can, and is, being overcome.
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I like digital news. Its immediate, its fun to fill. But no-one will say how many hard pounds it earns against newspaper income, which would be very interesting to know.
Which makes me think…..
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Goodness everyone – your comments have attracted a response from one of the ‘suits’ you’re always having a pop at – Dave Higgerson. Note that he didn’t mention anywhere in his response the thorny subject of money! Wales Online (among others), is doing very well, at precisely the same time that its papers are going down the drain, and as we all know it’s primarily still newspaper ad revenue and newspaper sales revenue keeping the company afloat. The answer to the question ‘does digital bring in enough ad revenue to offset the decline in traditional ad revenue and cover price revenue’ is still a big fat no.
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“Engagement metrics” eh! Sounds like something from a spanner factory.
Or, should that perhaps be something from a spammer factory. Given the content on some regional websites, that is much nearer the mark.
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I’m still not much clearer.
Just what do these figures translate to in money terms? And, what the hell are ‘engagement metrics’?
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Again though, it’s not digital news is it? It’s digital content. The debate isn’t print vs online, it’s between well researched, well written and well designed stroies vs a photograph of a dog dragging its backside along the grass.
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Only it’s not is it Jeff Jones? When I look, it’s news mainly. Maybe not up to the standard when you graced the industry with your prose, but news all the same.
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It’s all about the money, money, and that’s where I came in.
While grateful for Dave Higgerson for explanations of where growth and engagement have taken place, that’s about the clicks.
The truth remains that as we reach the stage where the last few cherished newspapers are eventually like protected species in the hands of small operations, none of the big regional groups is ever going to make enough online revenue to sustain even their leaner operations, and I’m including a much smaller number of corporate suits in that.
In the meantime they are shedding the actual content makers, so diminishing the value and quality of the products they do have. I’m still mystified… unless everything in the meantime is hot air and magician’s spiel until an end game where the remaining top management pick up the final big bucks for breaking up the businesses.
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Dick, I don’t have the hard figures but I can tell you that they have little to no financial impact upon the individual titles, only Trinity Mirror as a whole.
Trinity will tell national advertisers that they have more than 24m unique users across their regional network and, if you believe it, 100m nationally. http://www.newsmediauk.org/Latest/Page-12/trinity-mirror-passes-100m-unique-users-mark
They then promise to deliver an astronomical number of ‘impressions’ (the point at which an advert is displayed once on a web page) in return for, let’s say, £50,000.
All the regional, and even national websites, then carry the advert in every empty banner or MPU space as per the agreed deal.
Local ad reps can still sell into their own ad spaces for, let’s say, £500 a go which will then replace the national advert on those pages for whatever length of time, but these occasional local digital ads detract very little from the overall number of impressions created on the national ones.
The local newspaper gets to keep its occasional £500 here and there but it takes a lot of local ad reps to pull in the same amount of money as just one from head office.
This is why the regional publishers joined forces to create this http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/nov/19/johnston-press-newsquest-local-world-1xl-facebook-microsoft-google
Each will share a percentage of the overall national impressions created on their own networks but the potential reach for advertisers is amplified, making it a much more attractive prospect.
The sad thing is that all of this is being done at the expense of using the local reporting resource to create tedious nonsense about the weather or lottery results.
The aim is to create as many pages as possible on which to display these national adverts. If they get clicks, they create impressions and hit targets, so the Trinity shareholders et al are happy.
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If the Liverpool Echo has put on 90 per cent in a year it must have been doing something very wrong last year if there was such untapped potential for its website.
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