A regional publisher has credited a restructure for an increase in digital growth at a number of its titles.
Newsquest Scotland has reported a 31pc year-on-year rise in editorial article views for August, with page views also up by 15pc, according to the group’s unaudited internal metrics.
The website of Glasgow-based daily The Herald, which has a paywall, broke through the two million unique users mark for the month, while its Glasgow Evening Times sister site recorded more than five million views for the second month in a row.
The Herald was up 116pc and Evening Times 135pc respectively over the same 12-month period, while the site of pro-independence daily The National recorded its second highest ever figures and was up 196pc against last year.
Newsquest said the changes came following a restructuring of its Glasgow newsroom, which saw it make “a number of key editorial appointments to focus on growth.”
Editor-in-chief Donald Martin, pictured, said: “These are a fantastic set of figures across the board in the most highly competitive digital landscape in the UK and proof that our strategy to build sustained growth through quality journalism is paying off.
“Our combination of the best columnists, expanded opinion and analysis pages, and a reinvigorated approach to sport is delivering new audience for The Herald and Evening Times, while The National continues to serve the debate over independence for its growing number of readers.
“It’s been a challenging period for the editorial teams as we’ve sought to integrate our journalism into a platform agnostic system where the story is what matters most, and I’m proud of how they have all pulled together to make it a success.
“As we evolve, we’ve also been investing in new talent and bringing new skills into the business, all of which is paying dividends as our audience and subscription base grows.”
The company now also has one million social media followers across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram across all Newsquest Scotland titles.
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Well, I don’t know about being agnostic towards the platform, but i’m positively agnostic towards the unaudited internal metrics. Atheistic, in fact.
Now excuse me, I have a living to earn by making some income.
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So there is no credible evidence for any digital growth? This is the first sign of the new Newsquest then – no auditing, no industry standard measurements for figures. Just numbers plucked out the air, then mindlessly regurgitated by HTFP. Amazing.
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“…The Herald, which has a paywall, broke through the two million unique users mark for the month…Glasgow Evening Times …recorded more than five million views for the second month in a row”
So please tell me how much actual revenue the 2m UU was worth to the business in subscriptions and how much ad revenue the commercial team have actually bought in on the back of this increase in web traffic?
And whilst I am delighted to hear “sustained growth through quality journalism is paying off” from a business point of view again, how much in cold hard cash is that worth to the company?
Reading the piece some might say the traffic numbers simply mean nothing other than more people than ever are looking at the content for free which would be nothing to shout about, the opposite in fact ( though I’m sure that’s not the case here)
Simple questions any bean counter would want answered and figures which must be readily available to the editor who only appears to be quoting the traffic numbers in the piece above.
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I am delighted to announce I have just had my one millionth follower on Twitter, have 800,000 Instagram followers and have over 1.2 million ‘likes’ on Facebook.
These are appx 39.6% up y/y and are bucking the trend of online social media growth of anyone I know.
Are these numbers accurate?
They must be, I just said they were
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