My posts about: Express
Overall, Google drives the most US traffic to the nine UK national newspaper sites - 19.1%. News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic. Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6%.
On average, US traffic to UK newspaper sites is 36.8% of the UK traffic. The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it's a massive 62.5%.
By making use of ABCe data, we can check what Alexa says with the official audited data for UK newspapers. As the table shows, it's OK but not brilliant.
Other people have tweeted (or retweeted) the Guardian's URLs 328,288 times over the last 4 months - way more than any other UK newspaper.
The FT and Times have more followers on Twitter than the Telegraph and Mail - but they're not tweeted about as often. The Telegraph is in second place: 120,731 tweets have included a link to one if its URLs. The Daily Mail is 3rd with 95,851.
National newspapers have a total of 1,068,898 followers across all their Twitter accounts - with the Guardian, Times and FT the only three papers in the top 10 newspaper accounts. The Guardian's the clear Twitter winner, as it's place on the Twitter Suggested User List means that its GuardianTech account has 831,935 followers - 78% of the total ...
OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds. I was wrong.
The point I was trying to make was that there didn't seem much point having RSS icons in your header (Express) or by your search box (Mirror), or offering a brilliant RSS mashup feature (Guardian), or having RSS icons by each section of your news area (Independent) etc etc - but not doing anything to educate people about what they could do with all this.
The latest subscriber figures (see table below) show that, apart from a couple of exceptions, it's time for newspapers to turn off their RSS feeds - and hand over the server space, technical support and webpage real estate to something else. Like Twitter.
The express website is about to have a redesign. You can see it here. Here's a screenshot. They also seem to be moving URL from dailyexpress.co.uk to express.co.uk. It doesn't seem that much better to me ...
The Express doesn't update its website (express.co.uk) on a Sunday. So much for "Breaking news, sport and showbiz from the World's Greatest Newspaper - updated 24/7"
Newspaper websites are failing in some obvious ways to make their stories readable. Too many are using small fonts, long off-putting paragraphs, no subheadings, no in-content boxes or pictures, and no in-content links.
20 minutes after the Englang game finished at 9.55pm, half the major UK newspaper sites hadn't published the results.
Newspaper sites did very badly at linking to google's new street view service.
News sites are bad at linking out. Which of them managed to link to charity site rednoseday.com on its big day - and which failed to make mentions into proper hyperlinks.
What the Daily Express search examples tell us about its editorial agenda: anorexia, abortion, muslims, big ben, recipe, bnp, friends provident, apprentice, floods, care homes, immigration, binge drinking, lottery, Madeleine McCann, Liverpool FC.
When it comes to Fark, it's the Sun wots winning it. The Guardian come second - and yet again, the FT, Mirror and Express come last.
The Guardian has had more stores submitted to Reddit, the user-submitted news site, than any other UK newspaper website.
The Daily Telegraph has had more stories submitted to Digg, the social news website for sharing content, than any other UK newspaper site.
Which newspapers are stumbled a lot - and which are not ...
