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Tom Daley interview boosts newspaper's online profile

A video interview with one of Team GB’s Olympic stars has been getting a local newspaper unprecedented online exposure.

The Herald’s interview with Plymouth-based diver Tom Daley has been viewed more than 175,000 times after it was placed on YouTube a few weeks before the start of the Olympics.

The three-minute film was shot at 14-year-old Tom’s local pool in the spring and uploaded to The Herald’s thisisplymouth.co.uk site.

But web editor Neil Shaw said it wasn’t until the Olympics kicked off that the interview started getting an overwhelming number of hits on YouTube.

It was featured on YouTube’s homepage, was made a favourite by the website’s visitors, attracted more than 400 comments and has been embedded onto other websites.

Neil said: “The interest was phenomenal and saw dozens of people subscribing to videos through our YouTube channel.

“There’s no way we would have got 175,000 hits if it had just been on our website.

“We started uploading our videos to YouTube a few months ago, as well as uploading them to our own video player, and find it to be a fantastic way to get our content ‘out there’ and have it noticed.

“The video is branded with The Herald’s logo so this success has meant our name is now known across the world and is associated with content people want to watch.”

The video is YouTube’s second-most viewed featuring Tom Daley after the BBC’s interview which was added eight months ago. There are more than 230 Tom Daley videos on the site.

Using YouTube is part of a thisisplymouth.co.uk project to raise the profile of its content and the newspaper.

The project has also seen the website and The Herald gain 2,500 ‘friends’ on Facebook, 100 followers on microblogging site Twitter and 1,500 ‘friends’ on other social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo.

Comments

Arwel (29/08/2008 17:38:12)
It has to be said that quite a high proportion of those 230 Tom Daley videos on YouTube have been put there by teenage girls lusting after the lad!

Bex (16/09/2008 13:11:25)
not all of the teenage girls are supporting Tom because they fancy him, i am 13 and, yeah, i think he’s cute and all that but i think he is a fenomenal diver and that’s why i support him. tom, everyone i know is behind you so good luck for 2012!
Rebecca Backham
Kings Lynn
Norfolk