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ABCs: Same publisher scores top six regional websites

The top six performing regional news websites are all owned by the same publisher, today’s ABC figures have revealed.

The sextet of Trinity Mirror sites all saw a rise of more than 60pc year-on-year in the number of daily unique average browsers for the period January to June 2015.

The Liverpool Echo’s website saw the largest increase at 90.1pc.

The sites of The Newcastle Chronicle at 87.5pc, Teesside Gazette at 79.5pc, Manchester Evening News at 74.8pc and Birmingham Mail at 71.6pc came next.

Wales Online at 61.6pc, which incorporates the South Wales Echo and Western Mail, completed the six.

Local World titles The Sentinel, Stoke, and the Bristol Post had the next best performing websites.

Overall, the Trinity Mirror network recorded the highest number of daily unique browsers with 2,069,527, though a year-on-year comparison was not published.

Of the publishers was which such data was available, the KM Group’s Kent Online network saw the biggest increase with a 59.5pc rise.

Newsquest sites saw a 35.5pc increase, while Local World at 35.1pc, Johnston Press at 21.3pc and the Midlands News Associaton at 14.8pc also saw rises.

Only five regional newspaper websites – The Peterborough Telegraph, The Herald, Yorkshire Post, Scotsman and Coventry Telegraph – saw decreases in the number of daily unique browsers.

Of these, the largest decreases were at The Scotsman and Coventry Telegraph, with declines of 33.5pc and 35.9pc respectively.

The full list of audience figures for regional publisher online platforms is as follows:

Total Y-on-Y %
Kent Online (KM Group) network 105,696 59.5
Newsquest 1,269,287 35.5
Local World Network 1,228,953 35.1
Johnston Network 972,454 21.3
Midland News Association Network 164,511 14.8
Trinity Mirror Regional Network 2,069,527 N/A

The full list of audience figures for newspaper online platforms is as follows:

Total Y-on-Y %
Liverpool Echo 467,766 90.1
Newcastle Chronicle 218,334 87.5
Teesside Gazette 94,144 79.5
Manchester Evening News 573,342 74.8
Birmingham Mail 212,911 71.6
Wales Online 261,553 61.6
The Sentinel, Stoke 70,171 50.7
Bristol Post 88,502 48.4
Derby Telegraph 73,563 46.9
Southern Daily Echo 81,636 46.4
The Northern Echo 63,936 45.6
News Shopper 35,241 44.7
Scunthorpe Telegraph 29,862 44.2
Sunderland Echo 46,465 44
Glasgow Evening Times 48,431 41.9
Leicester Mercury 69,276 40.8
The Bolton News 50,249 40.5
The Star, Sheffield 62,317 38.7
South Wales Evening Post 56,433 38.6
Hull Daily Mail 85,727 37.9
Plymouth Herald 76,255 37.6
Bradford Telegraph & Argus 61,588 36.2
Gloucester Citizen/Gloucestershire Echo 34,610 35.6
Nottingham Post 72,511 35.3
Lancashire Evening Post 28,356 30.5
Grimsby Telegraph 39,122 29.9
The Argus, Brighton 51,086 27
Lancashire Telegraph 47,716 26.7
Swindon Advertiser 31,150 25.9
Shropshire Star 49,938 19
Cambridge News 47,537 17.9
The News, Portsmouth 44,919 17.4
Yorkshire Evening Post 69,901 13.6
Oxford Mail 30,368 13.6
Express & Star, Wolverhampton 119,683 12.7
The Press, York 44,244 11.3
Lincolnshire Echo 23,795 5.9
The Gazette, Blackpool 30,563 3.5
Peterborough Telegraph 18,927 -0.1
The Herald, Glasgow 84,503 -3.7
Yorkshire Post 25,615 -10.6
The Scotsman 106,510 -33.5
Coventry Telegraph 58,966 -35.9

11 comments

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  • August 26, 2015 at 2:33 pm
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    Less than 1,000,000 for all of the Johnston Press titles… That is a figure that should make all JP bosses hang their heads in shame.

    And the window of opportunity has long gone now… They started taking the internet seriously 10 years too late.

    All that’s left now is consolidation and then termination

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  • August 26, 2015 at 2:49 pm
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    Sad to see the Coventry Telegraph at the very bottom of the table, but thankfully David Higgerson has already explained the reasons behind this.

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  • August 26, 2015 at 3:55 pm
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    Local World could have double the figures if they got rid of their aggressive and counter productive advertising policy, all the comments I’ve seen on this suggest most people click straight off an article whenever a pop up comes into view.

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  • August 26, 2015 at 3:58 pm
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    Frankly, until someone comes up with an effective method of turning unique visitors into a substantial source of cash, this is all meaningless.
    It is, in essence, the same as Brighton City Council loudly trumpeting every year how many pebbles it has on its beaches. Since nobody gives a tinker’s cuss how many more pebbles are on the beaches, it would be pointless to announce it, just as it is pointless to crack open the Asti Spumanti every time a few hundred people click on a website that adds a fraction of a penny to the bottom line.

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  • August 26, 2015 at 4:37 pm
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    Dave is spot-on about Local World. People complain in their droves at the pop-up ads blocking the text they really want to read (would papers overlay news stories with ads?) and many never return. And who ever remembers the company advertised? Exactly. UGC is also right on a subject that will get me banned from here for being boring if I go on about it again – but the figures are meaningless in commercial terms. If people drift around your lovely department store and never put their hands in their pockets what is the point of them even being there? If every unique visitor was even worth just 10p in measurable return, fair enough. But they’re not and never will be.

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  • August 26, 2015 at 4:40 pm
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    To quite Jack Nicholson from As Good as It Gets: “I’d be the luckiest man alive if that did it for me.”

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  • August 27, 2015 at 10:16 am
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    Good point about the department store Dick Minim.
    It is similar to what I have been thinking for years.
    If I opened a pub offering free beer I would expect to have plenty of people turning up to take advantage but the business would soon go bust.The problem is that the internet business model at groups like Archant is deeply flawed. They have been banging on about it for well over 10 years and still have to find a winning formula. Yet still the same old faces tell us it is the golden goose. Those who have been pushing it for years without coming up with any meaningful solutions to monetise it should get out. If it was going to take off it would have taken off by now.

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  • August 27, 2015 at 7:51 pm
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    But Dick, the websites do make money. Millions of pounds, and growing every month. It doesn’t cover the decline in print but they do make money. The challenge is make sure they make enough money to ensure local journalism survives because if they don’t, local journalism dies. So the numbers aren’t meaningless, unlike the misinformed speculation which I hope one day does get you banned from here.

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  • August 28, 2015 at 1:09 pm
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    User generated Content: “Frankly, until someone comes up with an effective method of turning unique visitors into a substantial source of cash, this is all meaningless.”

    Hits the nail on the head. If you can’t increase a web audience when you are giving the site away for free, you can advertise the site for free in your own printed products and the market keeps growing as more people embrace the technology, then something is very, very wrong.
    Bigger audiences without substantially bigger revenue are meaningless.

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  • August 29, 2015 at 9:18 am
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    Trinity-Mirror have gone all in on the web. It’s working but is it paying off? Nah! Another round of redundancies anyone?

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