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Regional publisher credits breaking news ‘laser focus’ for record-breaking month

A regional publisher has credited a “laser focus on being first to breaking news” for a record-breaking month online.

Reach plc has revealed a number of its regional news sites broke digital records during July, with the company recording a total of 1.4 billion page views in total across its regional and national online portfolio.

Google Analytics showed Leicestershire Live, Belfast Live, Edinburgh Live, Cork Beo, Lancs Live, Leeds Live and MyLondon all posted record months, as did Football London, which broke 30 million page views.

The Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo each delivered more than two million page views every day throughout July, while the Bristol Post also broke through one million page views in a single day for the first time.

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Across its regional titles the weekday average page view count was 17.4 million, while weekends came in at 16.3 million.

By comparison, in July 2018, regional traffic usually peaked at 10 million page views a day.

Reach chief audience officer David Higgerson said: “July’s success was a culmination of our strategy coming together across the whole network – a laser focus on being first to breaking news wherever we are.

“And because our sites are so different, we’re not dependent on one major event to pull in these numbers.

“While the Mirror made the most of Love Island and the Express had market-leading Wimbledon coverage, Manchester showed brilliant reporting on the floods, and other sites have been seeing huge growth in football traffic.

“The key thing is, we’re always ready to adapt.”

6 comments

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  • August 13, 2019 at 9:59 am
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    Oh for goodness sake.

    Why are these big publishers always surprised that when they ‘do news’ well they get good results? Do they not understand basic journalism and people’s thirst for information at all?

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  • August 13, 2019 at 10:49 am
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    Anyone ever heard of ‘don’t be first, be accurate?’

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  • August 13, 2019 at 1:15 pm
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    And how much difference has this made to the bottom line?
    Figure please – in hard cash.

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  • August 13, 2019 at 4:42 pm
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    ‘Laser focus’ I’ll bet they had meetings to plan meetings and set up a committee to come up with that pretentious buzz word.

    As for; “…a total of 1.4 billion page views in total across its regional and national online portfolio” lovely stuff but what does that equate to in cold hard revenue terms?

    I’ll wait…..

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  • August 13, 2019 at 5:03 pm
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    Page views, online traffic vs revenue
    There’ll always be a divide and conflict within the business when one sector judges success by the number of times their content has been viewed whist the other ( comm) will only be interested in it’s worth to the business.
    The old cliche of claiming high viewing number makes the sites more appealing to potential business advertisers is tosh when the sales people can’t monetise it sufficiently.
    I wonder what ad reps or their managers feel about this crowing over web traffic?
    Anyone from the commercial depts care to comment?,

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  • August 15, 2019 at 10:21 am
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    Money. Selling things to people who want it. That’s what keeps businesses afloat. Not crowing over how many times what you have for sale has been looked at. I will refrain archantlifer: figures please, in hard cash.

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