The Birmingham Mail scored a performance double in the latest of Trinity Mirror’s monthly ABCe updates.
The Mail recorded the highest year-on-year increase in the number of daily average unique browsers on its website, as well as the number of ‘followers’ on its Twitter channel.
It scored a 55.1pc increase in the number of browsers on its site for January 2017 when compared with the corresponding month last year, while its number of Twitter followers rose by 71.7pc.
The Huddersfield Daily Examiner, at 42.5pc, and the Coventry Telegraph, at 25pc, recorded the second and third highest increases in unique browsers, with the Telegraph also posting a 56.2pc rise in Twitter followers.
The top three year-on-year performers for Facebook ‘likes’ were the Southport Visiter, 100.5pc, the North Wales Daily Post, 85.4pc, and Wales Online, 66.6pc.
The full figures for each newsbrand are as follows:
| Product | Metric | Jan-17 | MoM% | YoY% |
| Birmingham Mail | Daily web browsers | 357,713 | 28.8 | 55.1 |
| FB likes | 252,841 | 1.6 | 28.2 | |
| Twitter followers | 215,327 | 2.6 | 71.7 | |
| Bristol Post | Daily web browsers | 112,586 | 19.8 | |
| FB likes | 112,544 | 1.5 | ||
| Twitter followers | 98,977 | 2.1 | ||
| Cambridge News | Daily web browsers | 52,144 | 23.2 | |
| FB likes | 26,747 | 6.4 | ||
| Twitter followers | 65,863 | 2.3 | ||
| Chronicle Live (Newcastle) | Daily web browsers | 277,533 | 30.0 | 8.8 |
| FB likes | 220,847 | 1.7 | 37.6 | |
| Twitter followers | 135,543 | 2.4 | 53.7 | |
| Coventry Telegraph | Daily web browsers | 86,979 | 31.2 | 25.0 |
| FB likes | 40,649 | 3.5 | 52.6 | |
| Twitter followers | 65,266 | 2.4 | 56.2 | |
| Daily Post (Wales) | Daily web browsers | 99,963 | 23.2 | 17.9 |
| FB likes | 174,377 | 1.9 | 85.4 | |
| Twitter followers | 75,023 | 2.1 | 40.9 | |
| Derby Telegraph | Daily web browsers | 89,697 | 26.2 | |
| FB likes | 46,689 | 3.2 | ||
| Twitter followers | 60,867 | 1.8 | ||
| Get Reading | Daily web browsers | 45,404 | 2.0 | |
| Get Surrey | Daily web browsers | 58,660 | 12.0 | |
| Grimsby Telegraph | Daily web browsers | 46,904 | 22.1 | |
| FB likes | 35,349 | 2.5 | ||
| Twitter followers | 14,306 | 1.1 | ||
| Huddersfield Daily Examiner | Daily web browsers | 85,190 | 68.8 | 42.5 |
| FB likes | 82,539 | 2.1 | 31.5 | |
| Twitter followers | 49,001 | 1.5 | 30.3 | |
| Hull Daily Mail | Daily web browsers | 129,197 | 24.0 | |
| FB likes | 128,866 | 1.7 | ||
| Twitter followers | 63,607 | 2.7 | ||
| Leicester Mercury | Daily web browsers | 83,230 | 37.0 | |
| FB likes | 50,856 | 3.7 | ||
| Twitter followers | 84,682 | 2.3 | ||
| Liverpool Echo | Daily web browsers | 555,616 | 21.7 | 0.0 |
| FB likes | 1,152,963 | 0.4 | 8.9 | |
| Twitter followers | 329,438 | 1.2 | 27.4 | |
| Manchester Evening News | Daily web browsers | 785,747 | 20.4 | 13.3 |
| FB likes | 1,289,128 | 2.0 | 45.1 | |
| Twitter followers | 415,756 | 2.0 | 41.4 | |
| Nottingham Post | Daily web browsers | 113,624 | 23.3 | |
| FB likes | 83,671 | 1.8 | ||
| Twitter followers | 111,889 | 2.7 | ||
| Plymouth Herald | Daily web browsers | 94,161 | 17.3 | |
| FB likes | 98,732 | 2.0 | ||
| Twitter followers | 47,262 | 2.3 | ||
| South Wales Evening Post | Daily web browsers | 67,178 | 31.2 | |
| FB likes | 75,244 | 1.2 | ||
| Twitter followers | 56,698 | 2.0 | ||
| Teesside Evening Gazette/ | Daily web browsers | 134,347 | 30.1 | 18.9 |
| Gazette Live | FB likes | 107,729 | 1.4 | 23.1 |
| Twitter followers | 62,683 | 2.2 | 47.2 | |
| The Sentinel, Stoke | Daily web browsers | 91,204 | 14.8 | |
| FB likes | 85,496 | 2.2 | ||
| Twitter followers | 58,318 | 2.7 | ||
| Trinity Mirror Regional Network | Daily web browsers | 4,385,175 | 26.2 | 79.9 |
| Visiter (Southport) | Daily web browsers | 14,731 | 14.3 | -23.6 |
| FB likes | 13,900 | 3.0 | 100.6 | |
| Twitter followers | 8,818 | 0.8 | 17.3 | |
| Wales Online | Daily web browsers | 381,989 | 30.5 | 16.8 |
| FB likes | 344,820 | 2.4 | 66.6 | |
| Twitter followers | 156,076 | 2.5 | 59.0 |
Sign up for our free daily email bulletin
Follow HTFP on Twitter
Got a story? Email the Editor at
Notice the apathy around these meaningless bunched up figures and their lane attempts to convince potential readers, long gone advertisers and themselves that when your readership base has gone and the market for your product has walked, likes acd bisurys actually mean anything
I won’t waste my time asking the obvious question about how this translates to cold hard currency, were all bored with it now
Report this comment
* Likes and visitors
Apologies
Report this comment
Twitter followers up 71 per cent. I thought this was passe now, especially with the young audience.
Report this comment
As Norridge rightly says, do these ‘browsers’ and Twitter followers contribute a single penny to the business? Probably not. Does it result in an increase in advertising / advertising revenue either? See previous answer. It’s a once proud industry clutching at straws I’m sad to say.
Report this comment
If anyone still fails to understand how web traffic can contribute to a business, then just Google “programmatic advertising”.
Greater social media audience = more referrals = more page views = more money
It’s not rocket science.
Report this comment
It certainly is not “rocket science.”
It’s arrant nonsense.
Report this comment
if it is all going so swimmingly why don’t we see figures. Income from website ads v income from newspaper ads. Surely such good news deserves to be shared?
Report this comment
Trust me zenithar, the public and potential advertisers aren’t stupid and don’t need to understand rocket science to smell bull and desperation when they come across it, in my experience all a potential advertiser (remember those? They used to find the business and pay the wages) is interested in is how many actual copies are sold and thus how likely is their advert to return sales on investment? Everyone understands it and it’s factual, bundling up of anything and everything foolsno one and smacks of desperation
…it’s not rocket science
Report this comment
You’ve demonstrated my point perfectly there Archie. You’re only interested in the number of people who bought the paper. But online I could tell you exactly how many times your advert has been seen, and you would pay accordingly. No one is being fooled. If anything, it’s the other way round – like when we assume that three people read every copy of the paper.
Report this comment
Reporting average unique browsers on a website is fair enough, but selling advertising off the back of that whilst ignoring the number of browsers with ad-blockers installed is somewhat misleading.
Page Fair’s ‘2015 Ad Blocking Report’ stated UK ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
eMarketer expects that 27% of UK users will be using ad-blockers this year, up from 9.5% in 2014.
And, it would appear ad-block walls don’t help much, as around 75% of US users say they leave sites using them.
Another interesting stat, that doesn’t get explained to potential advertisers, is that over a third of all online advert clicks are accidental, so if you’re on ‘pay-per-click’, you’re paying for users’ clumsiness!
Report this comment
All good points, Mike, and these are the issues we should be talking about here instead of just pining for days gone by.
Ad blocking is a major problem that the industry needs to tackle – and that includes looking at how intrusive and annoying ads can be.
PPC is a bad idea – no one clicks on print ads, but people still pay for them. The value of display ads is all in the brand, not the clicks.
Report this comment