Northcliffe Media has announced record traffic for its “thisis” network of newspaper companion sites with visitors up 900,000 in the past two months.

The network attracted 4.3m visitors in January compared to 3.4m in November 2008 – an increase of 25pc.

The figures also reveal that the news channels on the 233 sites had an increase of 84pc in visitor numbers compared to January 2008, with over 1.8m visitors across the network.

The day with the highest number of visitors across the network was Wednesday 21 January 2009, with over 336,000 visitors to the sites on this date.

Northcliffe says that in addition to imporved content, it has focused on the functionality of its sites through improved search engine optimisation and stability.

Director of digital Mike Rowley said: “These figures are extremely exciting and show that we are going in the right direction with our online proposition.

“Northcliffe Media has been actively growing its online presence in order to provide our advertising partners with new local audiences and the latest results are testament to this work.

“The quality of content on the ‘this is’ network has never been better in terms of news, information and classifieds and combined with the improved search engine optimisation, we are providing all round better performance for local communities.”

Comments

All Subbed Out (10/02/2009 09:29:26)
Yet another example of Northcliffe’s schizophrenic selective memory. It lauds the hard work done by staff in bigging up websites – mostly by hard-pressed local reporters and editors with no extra resources – and then slashes jobs still further. All the hard work done by staff to grow interest and traffic at the CIN titles, for example, will be lost when the editorial department is butchered and subbing moved to Stoke, at which point it is suggested local websites may be lost in favour of a single Staffordshire site (even though several of the papers aren’t even in Staffordshire). The hypocrisy of a company which continues to emblazon itself with the slogan ‘At The Heart Of All Things Local’ is truly breathtaking at times.

MarionHaste (10/02/2009 10:50:31)
Exactly. If Tesco gives away beans on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, who the devil is going to pay for them on Friday? If you put all your expensively-gathered news content on line for free, don’t be surprised to see your sales in freefall.
All this trumpeting of unique users is meaningless unless the ad revenues match which, of course, they do not.
When will they wake up?

marionhaste (11/02/2009 23:08:54)
Aye, here’s the rub from Press Gazette, which today warned of yet another tranche of job cuts at Northcliffe following a 40 per cent year-on-year decline in January advertising revenues.
It adds: “Northcliffe recorded a six per cent year-on-year rise in digital revenues in the last quarter of 2008.
“Its network of “thisis” websites claimed a 67 per cent year-on-year increase in December unique visitors.”
So, a six per cent rise in revenues from a 67 per cent rise in ‘unique user’ traffic on its websites. Hmmmm.