Newspaper sites unique audience, July 2007

Posted on August 30, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Newspapers | Leave a Comment

From Press Gazette - Nielsen/Netratings UK panel

  1. Guardian Unlimited, 2.41m
  2. Sun Online, 2.06m
  3. Times Online, 1.74m
  4. Telegraph.co.uk, 1.72m
  5. Mail Online, 1.29m
  6. Scotsman.com, 669,000
  7. Mirror.co.uk, 627,000
  8. Independent Online, 500,000
  9. FT.com, 389,000

Quigo prepares for IPO after signing deal with Time Inc.

Posted on June 29, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Contextual, Future, Journalism, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services | 1 Comment

Batya Feldman reports in Globes Online that Quigo has raised $30 million from Institutional Venture Partners.

One to watch - they have c. 10% of the contextual ad market already.  I spoke with Quigo last year but it was slightly too early as they were not geared up to working in the UK.

If they get the service right I reckon this is where the majority of the large publishers will end up. The killer is that it allows publishers to retain and develop relationships with their existing advertisers - rather than pass them onto a third-party who may turn out to be a competitor (guess who?).

The key selling points from their site:

Own Advertiser Relationships

The advertisers you attract are yours. Build relationships and up-sell/cross-sell your advertisers new products. Earn revenue when they spend on other sites in the AdSonar Network.

Capture Your Brand's Value

Leverage your premier brand to command a higher cost-per-click from advertisers willing to pay for your site’s targeted, quality traffic. Set your own minimum bid – don’t dilute your site’s value on a network that doesn’t promote direct placements.

Don't Empower Your Competitors

The AdSonar solution is focused on one goal – helping you. Don’t surrender your advertiser base to networks that also compete with you for audience or advertisers. Take back control!

Viewing User Generated Content seventh most popular online activity in UK …

Posted on March 21, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Mobile, Newspapers, Search, Technology, Tools and Services, Traffic, Travel, Trends, User Generated | Leave a Comment

iLevel Internet Usage statistics - the “Activities on the Web” category is quite interesting - UGC (I guess this covers MySpace etc. as well as reading comments on news sites etc.) is seventh most popular category:

Using e-mail 25.00 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Sourcing Info on Activities/Interests 21.27 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Making Travel Plans 17.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Cinema/Theatre/Concert Listings 14.88 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Listening to Music 12.12 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at Job Opportunities 11.59 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Looking at User Generated Content 11.13 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Downloading Music (whether paid or free) 9.98 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
Instant Messaging 9.41 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To watch video clips 9.30 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor
To play games 9.05 million Nov-06 BMRB Internet Monitor

Tagging and The Scotsman Digital Archive

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Archive, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Tools and Services, User Generated, del.icio.us | Leave a Comment

Following on from some of the issues raised in “When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing“.  

The team behind the Scotsman Digital Archive - a searchable archive of The Scotsman newspaper from 1817-1950 developed during 2005 - http://archive.scotsman.com/ - developed functionality that allows users to “clip” and “tag” articles of interest that they might want to get back to later.

Scotdman ArchiveThis is important in the context of a relatively large repository - and especially important when searching across text extracted via OCR from historical material. 

The tagging functionality allows users to organise, group and locate articles easily and was quickly adopted by the user community as the benefits were substantial and obvious.

Clearly this tagging adds a great deal of value to the archive, providing some structure and pathways to difficult to find or significant material that could ultimately benefit the wider community of users.

The next obvious stage of development would have been to develop the social/community side of this by allowing users to share their tags with other users, make them public and connect with each other.  This reinforces the principle that the best way to get users to add value to data is to do it in such a way that they don’t realise they are doing so - I guess this is the same as saying provide a clear incentive (see Amazon, Google Maps, Listal.com etc).  It also goes without saying that it should be as pain-free as possible.

The other point to note here is that in certain circumstances you can get users to tag for the greater good - and not just as a by-product of some personal benefit.  You can see this in del.icio.us where individuals can develop into experts through their consistent and regular tagging of material on specific subject areas.  These experts can eventually develop a “network” of like minded indivuduals and attract “fans” who track what they are tagging via RSS.  This network effect is one of the most powerful aspects of del.icio.us.  The profile that the experts receive from their peers within the community is a great incentive to continue tagging. 

[Disclosure:  Please note author is former General Manager of scotsman.com.]

Quigo challenges Google and Yahoo in contextual search market

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Future, Good Things, Newspapers, Search, Traffic | Leave a Comment

Quigo LogoThe International Herald Tribune reports on how Quigo Technologies is challenging Google and Yahoo in the contextual advertising space as they claim to give publishers more control and provide greater transparency. 

This and the ability to target specific sites is good but the big benefit as far as I can see is that Quigo allows publishers to manage the relationship with the advertiser - it means that they are not handing existing relationships from their own sales teams to Google or Yahoo.  

“Google, Yahoo and most other blind networks sit in the middle and own the advertiser relationships,” said Henry Vogel, the chief revenue officer of Quigo, which was founded in Israel in 2001. “By outsourcing their performance marketing programs to them, publishers get a check but little else. They don’t really build any longer-lasting strategic assets.”

I spoke to Quigo last year after they had signed up ESPN but at the time they were not ready to operate in Europe.

ABC launch report to measure print and online audience

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Newspapers, Tools and Services, Traffic | Leave a Comment

 ABC has announced the launch of a new system that will allow publishers to measure audience across print and online.

The Group Product Report, which launches today, is billed as a tool for media owners to publicise their ABC-audited and verified figures across media platforms, all on the same report.

The Guardian and News International have already agreed to provide Group Product Reports.

U.S. traffic to UK Newspaper Web Sites - Quantcast v Compete

Posted on February 26, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Analytics, Newspapers, Tools and Services, Traffic | Leave a Comment

Following on from the recent article by Matt Marshall on VentureBeat - “Traffic measuring continued: Why Compete doesn’t work, and why Quantcast does“.  I take on board the comments Mark makes but it turns out compete.com  and quantcast.com are remarkably consistent in terms of measuring the volume of U.S. Unique Users to UK newspaper web sites.  I guess that they might not be accurate in terms of actual numbers but they should be in terms of overall rank (unless one or more of them have the tracking pixel from quantcast.com).

Unique Visitors from U.S.
Rank News Site www.compete.com www.quantcast.com
1 guardian.co.uk 1,781,531 1,800,000
2 dailymail.co.uk 1,314,027 1,400,000
3 timesonline.co.uk 1,310,784 1,300,000
4 telegraph.co.uk 840,806 843,709
5 independent.co.uk 671,007 709,228
6 Thesun.co.uk 656,315 592,674
7 ft.com 575,770 634,923
8 scotsman.com 490,604 549,443
9 Themirror.co.uk 154,987 120,994
10 Theherald.co.uk 25,889 19,446

Interesting that Quantcast seems to round the Unique User numbers when it gets into the millions.  Need to do some more work on rank, visit duration, pages per visit etc. Also need to get stats from alexaholic.com.

More than one million unique, historical newspaper pages online …

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Good Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

Announced on the 15th February via press release, Small Town Papers Inc. have partnered with World Vital Records, Inc., to make over one million newspaper pages from small towns across America available and searchable online.  

The press release states that:

“We selected World Vital Records to distribute our collection of small-town newspapers because of their commitment to the millions of people who want to research their family history,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc. “World Vital Records is delivering on their mission to help people discover their ancestors with an incredible collection of exclusive materials, including SmallTownPapers.”

Current editions are available from over 250 small town newspapers and users can also search the archive.  Users have to register to access added benefits such as the “Scrap Book” and “Notifiers”.  The revenue model appears to be advertising rather than subscription based and the site looks to be reasonably well monetised via display and contextual (Google AdSense) advertising deals.  Geo-targeting of ads also appears to be pretty good - while looking at an edition of the Mifflinburg Telegraph from November 10th 2005 I was getting sky and banner ads from The Sun (UK national) and Talk Talk (UK Broadband service).  

There is a “order a digital reprint” link but it doesn’t work so I guess there are plans to offer this service online eventually.

They are looking to extend the service.  On the ”For Publishers” page it states:

“Would you like your newspaper to be included in the  SmallTownPapers web site? We can convert your paper or film archives to a fully-searchable image archive. Small community  newspapers can participate with little or no cost.” 

As far as I could tell boolean operators are not available in search and pages are not segemented into individual articles for search or display purposes - meaning you can’t search for “apples AND pears” within the same article.  If you search for  ”Edinburgh garden” you get “Edinburgh” from one article and “garden” from another which makes it harder to find things.

Saying that - not bad for a free service.  

Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile?

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content | 1 Comment

Following on from the Roy Greenslade post on newspaper Digital Editions - “Is PDF an acronym for Pretty Damn Futile?”

Digital Editions are indeed an easy leap for old word print editors / execs to make - amazing that they are still going for it with such enthusiasm really.  Half an hour of research would tell them that it simply isn’t going to meet their objectives - if  those objectives include significant subscription or ad revenues.

It ticks the “digital” box, but in reality doesn’t really do much else in terms of value for the regular user.  Any demand there is comes from those that need to keep a record of how the paper actually looked when it was published - ad agencies, media monitoring companies and there also tends to be a small market for certain types of reader who are out of circulation area.  Even if they were available for free most users would never use them - they will go to the newspaper web site or use Google or Google News to find current or older articles. 

Last time I reviewed uptake of digital editions among newspaper titles (to be honest it was some time ago now) it varied between 0.2% and 1% of actual newspaper circulation - at this rate it was always going to be a struggle to get revenue to justify the cost of production.  Even the NYT who invested in their digital edition provider - NewsStand - and were therefore more incentivised than most to make it work, could only make it to the higher end of this range. It could be that uptake has changed for these services - but I doubt it.  Anyone got any stats on this other than the recent report analysis on Norwegian titles?

One area that does seems to work a bit better is specialist publications and magazines where readers like to hold on to copies for reference purposes and build their own archive. 

As more newspapers digitise their historical material there will at least be some justification for the cost of production as the process of turning the newspaper into a Digital Edition can also populate a Digital Archive - allowing users to search from the first edition of the newspaper to the most recent from a single user interface. 

Even this justification will be short-lived as the goal will be to eventually populate the Digital Archive directly from the newspaper / web site production system - The Guardian and Observer already do this for their Digital Editions.

This is quite old but good overview of the key suppliers and issues from J.D. Lassica in OJR from June 2004 - “Are Digital Newspaper Editions More Than Smoke and Mirrors?“

Media syndication startup Mochila gets $8M funding

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology | Leave a Comment

Red Herring reports on the new funding for Mochila.  They have an interesting model that combines good return for publishers on their licensed material when it is syndicated (70%) and a resonable 30% on any ad revenue generated from free material (40% goes to rights owner) - in both cases Mochila keeps 30%.

“The barriers into the media business are now very low. They’ve taken away the barriers of being a buyer of media,” Charles River Ventures partner Austin Westerling said. “What they’re basically doing there is creating an ad network on top of already high-quality content. I think there’s quite an interesting opportunity.” 

 

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