A regional daily increased its online readership by three-quarters and topped the web charts in the latest round of Trinity Mirror ABCe figures.
The Coventry Telegraph recorded a 75.4pc year-on-year increase in the number of daily average unique browsers visiting its website during August.
On average, 109,935 readers visited the Telegraph’s site each day over the course of the month.
Elsewhere, Southport weekly The Visiter headed Trinity Mirror’s Facebook growth charts for the fourth month in a row, with a 58.5pc year-on-year increase in subscribers.
On Twitter, the Birmingham Mail recorded its seventh consecutive table-topping performance in a row, with a 44.6pc increase in the number of followers it has gained on the social network.
Average daily unique browsers for each newsbrand are as follows:
Product | Daily users | MoM% | YoY% |
Birmingham Mail | 400,978 | -1.0 | 39.9 |
Bristol Post | 155,673 | -6.3 | N/A |
Cambridge News | 63,150 | -6.2 | N/A |
Chronicle Live (Newcastle) | 296,428 | -5.2 | 10.2 |
Coventry Telegraph | 109,935 | 1.1 | 75.4 |
Daily Post (Wales) | 115,484 | -7.7 | 24.9 |
Derby Telegraph | 97,430 | 0.0 | N/A |
Gazette Live (Teesside) | 129,721 | -1.2 | 19.2 |
Get Reading | 61,374 | 7.1 | -3.6 |
Get Surrey | 74,455 | -5.4 | 47.0 |
Grimsby Telegraph | 50,058 | 14.8 | N/A |
Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 82,163 | -2.2 | 27.3 |
Hull Daily Mail | 134,072 | 1.5 | 21.4 |
Leicester Mercury | 99,590 | 4.0 | 33.0 |
Liverpool Echo | 796,714 | 7.2 | 33.2 |
Manchester Evening News | 951,812 | -0.5 | 14.2 |
Nottingham Post | 119,585 | -1.3 | N/A |
Plymouth Herald | 98,912 | -3.3 | N/A |
The Sentinel, Stoke | 99,540 | 7.3 | 29.1 |
Trinity Mirror Regional Network | 4,915,058 | -0.8 | 26.1 |
Visiter (Southport) | 16,374 | -10.1 | 29.7 |
Wales Online | 423,835 | -4.4 | 32.9 |
Numbers of Facebook likes for each newsbrand are as follows:
Product | Likes | MoM% | YoY% |
Birmingham Mail | 288,161 | 1.1 | 24.7 |
Bristol Post | 136,058 | 2.4 | N/A |
Cambridge News | 46,773 | 4.9 | N/A |
Chronicle Live (Newcastle) | 252,909 | 1.3 | 27.0 |
Coventry Telegraph | 51,972 | 2.7 | 52.1 |
Daily Post (Wales) | 197,976 | 1.3 | 52.3 |
Derby Telegraph | 59,305 | 3.9 | N/A |
Grimsby Telegraph | 40,886 | 3.4 | N/A |
Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 95,090 | 1.9 | 26.5 |
Hull Daily Mail | 141,949 | 1.3 | 22.9 |
Leicester Mercury | 63,327 | 3.9 | 40.6 |
Liverpool Echo | 1,206,686 | 0.5 | 7.1 |
Manchester Evening News | 1,487,024 | 1.1 | 31.6 |
Nottingham Post | 97,490 | 2.5 | N/A |
Plymouth Herald | 108,064 | 1.0 | N/A |
Teesside Evening Gazette | 117,778 | 1.0 | 18.9 |
The Sentinel, Stoke | 94,088 | 0.9 | 28.0 |
Visiter (Southport) | 16,925 | 2.0 | 58.5 |
Wales Online | 412,214 | 2.0 | 37.0 |
Numbers of Twitter followers for each newsbrand are as follows:
Product | Followers | MoM% | YoY% |
Birmingham Mail | 250,344 | 1.5 | 44.6 |
Bristol Post | 114,600 | 1.7 | N/A |
Cambridge News | 75,332 | 1.3 | N/A |
Chronicle Live (Newcastle) | 156,191 | 1.4 | 36.3 |
Coventry Telegraph | 73,944 | 1.2 | 35.9 |
Daily Post (Wales) | 84,517 | 1.2 | 29.1 |
Derby Telegraph | 66,921 | 1.1 | N/A |
Grimsby Telegraph | 15,227 | 0.8 | N/A |
Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 53,769 | 1.0 | 21.0 |
Hull Daily Mail | 72,464 | 1.2 | 33.8 |
Leicester Mercury | 96,172 | 1.3 | 33.4 |
Liverpool Echo | 372,928 | 1.7 | 23.7 |
Manchester Evening News | 493,633 | 1.3 | 36.7 |
Nottingham Post | 128,755 | 1.4 | N/A |
Plymouth Herald | 53,425 | 1.3 | N/A |
Teesside Evening Gazette | 71,264 | 1.3 | 32.4 |
The Sentinel, Stoke | 67,796 | 1.4 | 42.0 |
Visiter (Southport) | 9,385 | 1.2 | 11.7 |
Wales Online | 183,697 | 1.6 | 40.9 |
I would love to see a detailed break down of hits on stories.
Is this a show of faith in the clickbait that exists, is it about sports reports, particularly from exiles following Coventry City and Wasps?
Or is it about genuine news stories?
I have my last dollar in my pocket ready…
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We need more than just hits and unique users. Success on the web is about how long people stay with your story, whether they then click through and read some others and how often they come back. With all due respect to the Birmingham Mail and the Coventry Telegraph, you only have to look at their Facebook pages under the stories that they’ve just either re-posted from the Mirror or done very little journalism with to see all the comments saying “how is this news” etc.
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It’s very interesting to note how many are down mom also. Just two months ago, Cambridge News was celebrating a 97.4% increase in year on year stats but since then it’s fallen 28%. Strange how the year on year data was available 2 months ago, but not when the numbers have fallen. That’s two consecutive months of online decline. As others have said though, time on site, page views per visit etc are more reliable and useful metrics for advertisers, not flawed ub figures.
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As a long standing hack – 20 years in print, now digital – I can see many of you are looking through rose tinted glasses. Firstly, it was always a given that holding the readers’ attention was never that easy. Even under print it was well known they’d read the headline, sub deck and the first three paragraphs. Anything after that was a bonus. The only difference is that there was no way to measure them then. I once watched a reader spend 20 minutes going back to front of my 42 page weekly – and very happy I was too, until he complained that “there was nothing in it”. He was a troll without a Facebook page. They’ve always been with us.
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Hi
In answer to the questions here:
Saddened journo: The stories which attracted the highest number of visitors in Coventry last month were a mixture of local news, national news and sports stories. These ranged from a Coventry City story based on quotes from the manager, through to police raids on a Coventry restaurant through to product recalls from Tesco.
Yesterday’s news: We track stories by page views and also by the average active engaged time per article – so how long someone spent moving around an article. So the best-performing stories in Coventry last month included a mix of sport, local news, national news and informational content we believe local readers find interesting. It’s a very different list from the top stories by unique visitors, and includes a report of a funeral, a live blog of GCSE results day, an info article on how to access 30 hours free childcare (linking into a new story about confusion over what was happening), and a shared piece of content about the background to a new horror film. I take your point about seeing only a selection of stories on Facebook feeds, and we choose what we post based on what we think the people who like our pages are most likely to respond to. If we get this right, it makes it more likely we can get strong engagement on other local stories being posted which people may not necessarily actively share, but which we think are important. The whole ‘call this news’ thing isn’t really that different to the mocking of news judgements which any local journalist will be familiar with, in my view.
Napoleon Solo: Cambridge had a particularly strong month in June, hence the two months of decline you mention. August was the fourth best month of the year, and up 69% year on year. Average engaged time is rising, and as mentioned above, looking at what keeps people for a longer period of time does factor into thinking – whether it’s a meaningful metric when presented in a table like above I don’t know.
Percy Hoskins: I agree with you. If you take research from previous years, you’d often find someone spent 30 minutes with a newspaper. Based on that, average of 30 to 40 seconds per article, perhaps rising much higher on specific stories, feels as though the right story, presented well, can retain attention as much online as ever it did in print.
Hope this info is of interest.
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