All bar two of a newspaper publisher’s regional websites have seen an increase in the average number of unique browsers during July.
The latest ABC monthly multi-platform reports have revealed the month-on-month increases on the sites of Trinity Mirror dailies.
The report is the first to be published since Trinity Mirror opted to stop publishing monthly print figures.
The Manchester Evening News site recorded the largest increase, with a 22.4pc rise in daily average unique browsers throughout July.
Newcastle daily The Journal, which merged its web operation with that of sister title The Chronicle during the month, saw a 28.3pc decrease in traffic.
Wales Online also suffered a 6.3pc decrease across the period.
The following table shows the figures for July in full:
| Website | Daily average UB | M-o-M change (pc) | Y-o-Y change (pc) |
| Birmingham Mail | 253,417 | 19 | 90.6 |
| Coventry Telegraph | 60,493 | 2.6 | -36.7 |
| Daily Post (Wales) | 77,117 | 9.3 | 94.5 |
| Huddersfield Daily Examiner | 52,979 | 10.6 | -0.3 |
| Liverpool Echo | 514,040 | 9.9 | 43.8 |
| Manchester Evening News | 701,717 | 22.4 | 106.9 |
| Newcastle Chronicle | 232,832 | 6.6 | 43.9 |
| Teesside Evening Gazette | 99,272 | 5.4 | 51.6 |
| The Journal | 9,124 | -28.3 | N/A |
| Visiter.co.uk | 9,308 | 0.4 | N/A |
| Wales Online | 245,033 | -6.3 | 51.3 |
| Trinity Mirror Regionals | 2,309,657 | 11.6 | N/A |
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Ok, I’ll bite. what is a unique browser???
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The story misses the point completely. Month-on-month is almost meaningless. The only real measure of success is year-on-year difference.
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There’s little value in me adding to the ‘so what?’ comments that go hand-in-hand with tales of digital progress, but could someone please at least explain how most sites listed here are enjoying YoY increases of about 50%, and yet the Coventry Telegraph and the Huddersfield Daily Examiner are posting minus figures?
Is this down to skewed figures or poor performance?
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Cue Oliver to dive in here and explain why these figures mean everyone at TM can stop worrying, handsome Christmas bonuses are being calculated as we speak, and the future is bright for all employees. Over to you, sir…
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Eek! What did the Coventry Telegraph do so wrong for the digital tide to go against them like that?
The MEN’s figures really put them to shame (and the Birmingham Mail, serving the so-called ‘Second City’, looks a bit sick by comparison too).
That said, as a long-time former employee of the MEN, I join Dick Minim’s constant refrain in asking exactly how all this website traffic translates into hard revenue. I hope it doesn’t happen, but wouldn’t it be cruel for the MEN to record ever-increasing digital traffic while announcing yet another round of redundancies?
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I would guess the Hudds results are up against last year’s Tour De France spike….which means their performance in July would have been right up there against a ‘normal’ month.
Enjoy yourselves knocking the results of these sites. People work incredibly hard agains very tough targets and am sure they are delighted at their efforts being tossed in the ‘but does it make any money’ pile.
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The Egg Man: By my reckoning TM is a business, owned by shareholders, and operating within a capitalist society. Its sole function, therefore, is to make money to enhance those shareholders’ investments and reward its employees, and to increase the amount of money made on a year-by-year basis. Every activity of the company thus has to contribute to this money-making process ie. it must be profitable. Of course, the staff actually maintaining the websites have talent, integrity, the work ethic, and so on and so forth, but my question is do the people who control the company (board members and senior executives) have the ability and knowledge to turn the loudly trumpeted numbers quoted here into hard cash? I feel they don’t and even though that may not be their fault, it’s still disingenuous, to say the least, that these “unique browsers” figures are presented as manna from commercial heaven. The ‘does it make any money’ pile is the ONLY pile that a business – A BUSINESS! – can toss its efforts on to, Eggy, old bean, and that’s a fact.
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Isn’t a gradual increase in web traffic a given, for saying that the number of internet enabled devices are always on the rise? So more people are viewing the papers online rather than in print?
My experience is that managers that expect constant year on year and month on month increases never seem to take into account that whatever special ‘online’ content you put on, ultimately if there is big news in the areas such as a big crime or a football teams promotion push that is always going to have an effect.
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Come on Egg Man, this is the real world.
No doubt people work hard to get results, but without the validity of the business model being questioned, how can the people running newspapers these days know they’re going in the right direction?
Newspapers are businesses – not a charitably-funded public service. Newspaper sales clearly cannot be relied upon anymore. Those days are gone. Instead, old skills must now translate into a digital world. One in which success will be judged on how much money it can make in order to pay for the wages of those people who work hard to deliver the content.
If their efforts don’t produce revenue, they can’t be employed, and the business cannot continue.
It’s not difficult.
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The Coventry Telegraph had two very high profile stories last year. The tragic Daniel Pelka case and the Sky Blues leaving the Ricoh. Since then it’s been business as usual and with all the cuts to staffing numbers, it is struggling to find the stories that will attract readers to either its print or digital platforms.
This is no reflection on the staff, past or present, but simple Trinity Mirror’s approach. Driving their business into the ground.
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Hi everyone,
A lot of speculation on here so I thought I’d explain some of the details behind the numbers. Coventry’s year on year decline is just a blip, and is down to two or three stories which went viral last year which we can’t hope to replicate. Page views are up on last year in Coventry, and with those two or three stories removed from year on year numbers, Coventry is doing very well. Like all of our sites, it is seeing readers returning more often, viewing more pages and spending longer on each article.
In Huddersfield, as Eggman said, it’s 12 months since the Tour De France came to Yorkshire. As someone noted above, month on month comparisons can be of limited value as they don’t take into account big news events, and the same can sometimes be said of year on year comparisons, and that’s the case here. However, it’s worth remembering that just covering a big news event isn’t enough to drive audiences to our sites, we have to make sure we do it in the right way – we have far more competitors online for our stories than we ever did have in print.
As ever, a lot of ‘but what’s the point if it makes no money’ comments have been made here. Websites do generate income, and that income is going up sharply year on year. As someone noted, Trinity Mirror is a PLC so you wouldn’t expect details and numbers to be shared via a comments thread on Holdthefrontpage. However, the long-term future of regional journalism relies on building loyal audiences online who appreciate what we do and who advertisers want to reach. The audience and revenue numbers I see show we’re getting better at that every week.
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You’ve got to give TM credit when it’s due. They are good at getting rid of people who are costly – mostly the best performers. To the outsider it looks as if the business is ticking along nicely with prudent savings being taken to maintain earnings from ever-dwindling revenues. The charade is running out of steam despite a smiley face being put on performance with the long awaited dividend payment. The fewer playing cards there are to prop up the house the greater likelihood the house will come tumbling down.
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Why is so much emphasis put on ‘ unique browsers’? or ‘site visitors’ ? when judging the success or effectiveness of a company’s website?
I liken this to counting the number of people who looked in the shop window,or who picked up a free brochure as opposed to someone who came info the shop and made a purchase which is what it’s all about,turning viewers into payinh customers .
The success of any business in any other field than digital has never been judged by how many people take a look at or show an interest in something , only by how much money the business makes from people making a purchase, no other aspect of business judges its effectiveness in such an inaccurate way
Its ok for giving a snap shot of interest in the site but not accurate enough to get carried away by how successful it is when the monitoring process used is so sketchy.
To me this kind of fluffy statistic and monitoring process is meaningless and will be until someone comes up with a way of monetising a web site and being able to accurately and openly show how profitable and effective it is and until someone comes up with a way of monitoring revenue we will have this type of debate about the factors behind the success or otherwise of a digital site with no one being any the wiser
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Thanks Dick but, as you know, I’m not a fan of the current regional digital business model.
I’ve said it before but while these websites centre around a national advertising model, the figures make little difference to local newspapers.
When I worked on regional websites, I remember the figures of one particular site when I left.
Out of an average of 270,000 unique users per month, 23 per cent (62,100) were from the city and 56 per cent (151,200) were from the county.
Just over two years later, the same site now boasts 520,000 unique users per month, but guess what?
Just 13 per cent (67,600) are from the city and 28 per cent (145,600) are from the county.
All the extra traffic has been created by some clever back-end SEO work and asking editors to upload nonsense about the weather and lottery results, as well as trying get quirky stories on to websites like Fark, Clumsy Crooks or Reddit.
They even create ‘stories’ by asking who readers think will win the X Factor, Great British Bake Off and so on without even so much as a tenuous link to the area, simply in order to get extra users from anywhere.
This means that they can shout about huge numbers of impressions they generate for national brands, advertising targets are hit, then bonuses and dividends get paid.
Focusing on selling into these inflated figures at a local level causes problems in terms of expectations and value for money.
Even though much of the local property, cars, jobs and classified advertising has been lost to digital niches, I believe that there’s still an opportunity for local newspapers to make money out of digital ad campaigns.
Much of the local digital and print audiences are actually the same people, but the way in which they ‘consume’ content on each platform is very different. This just means that they need to nurture local businesses as much as the local audience.
The problem is that while this model might make enough money to keep an independent newspaper owner happy and a few people in a job, it’s not enough to keep regional shareholders happy.
That’s why I believe that the big regionals will cause the demise of so many great local papers.
At present, it’ll only take one major change to the Google or Facebook news algorithm to put current ‘content creation/curation’ model in jeopardy and, along with it, national advertising impressions and shareholder dividends!
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“What Miley Cyrus did next will shock you!”
What, sing in tune?
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Click bait attracts more clicks shock. But look at some of the nonsense being put up. The Liverpool ECHO had a story on whether it is Home Bargains or Home and Bargains. Last one out close the door behind you.
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