Trinity Mirror’s regional websites are heavily outscoring most national newspapers in terms of online audience growth, latest figures have revealed.
The ABC multi-platform figures for June show the company’s major regional newspaper websites have all doubled their traffic over the past year while one has quadrupled it.
The Coventry Telegraph now boasts 92,047 average daily unique users – an increase of 303pc.
Meanwhile the Manchester Evening News, Liverpool Echo, Teesside Gazette, Newcastle Chronicle, Birmingham Mail and Wales Online websites all saw big year-on-year increases.
By contrast the only national newspaper to more than double its audience figure was Metro, which rose by 212pc.
Mail Online – still the biggest news website with 10.9m daily unique users – managed a 34pc year-on-year increase.
Trinity Mirror is in the process of rolling out a digital-first strategy across its regional newsrooms with Manchester set to follow Newcastle and Cardiff in bringing in the ‘Newsroom 3.1′ blueprint.
The full figures are as follows:
| Title | Ave Dly UUs Jun |
Y-on-Y change |
|
Manchester Evening News
|
327,953 | 186.28 |
| Liverpool Echo | 246,055 | 169.99 |
| Wales Online | 161,845 | 152.99 |
| Birmingham Mail | 124,105 | 162.33 |
| Newcastle Chronicle | 116,440 | 178.50 |
| Coventry Telegraph | 92,047 | 303.52 |
| Teesside Evening Gazette | 52,442 | 131.08 |
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All I take from this is that regional papers have been drastically behind the times for many years, and are still playing catch-up. The only reason the nationals aren’t posting the same high figures now is that they did so years ago.
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Great stuff!
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Oh come on Charles. Don’t be a sourpuss.
How about well done to us?
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Does the revenue follow shift to digital?
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5 years too late
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Charles is 100% correct, great news, but years late.
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It would be useful to know what drives the growth, listicles? More users from social, viral content? Impact of newsroom changes? Numbers have little use without some kind of context.
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Coming after news on HTFP of the predominantly double-digit falls in circulation for its print titles, does this mean that Trinity Mirror have officially given up on newspapers to focus on digital?
It will also be interesting to see how this admirable growth in digital traffic equates to increases in revenue.
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Pity that it doesn’t result in any meaningful profit or increase in the share prices.
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‘Newsroom 3.1′. Oh, for God’s sake, listen to yourselves. Who do you think you’re impressing with these inane, pretentious neologisms? Was there a Newsroom 2.9, then, or a Newsroom 1.7.1? Is Newsroom 3.2 going to rectify the bug that caused Japanese characters to display incorrectly in Newsroom 3.1? Even if the figures were impressive (and when you’re starting from a base that low, any growth’s going to look amazing) there’s no surer way than a clever-clever project name to let everyone know you’re a total pillock who hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about. And unless you’ve stopped producing newspapers completely, please stop talking about ‘digital first'; it’s still all about dead trees.
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By what exact proportion has revenue – and hence profit – increased along with digital views? There are hard numbers available on both sides of the equation so a percentage figure surely only needs basic long division to arrive at. It’d be interesting to compare whatever number comes out to one calculated on the same basis – but using paper circulations – for things, say, 20 years ago. It might explain why many regional hacks, especially young ones, earn less than a deli counter manager in a supermarket.
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