Mobile versions of websites – what a train crash they often are. As I write this, at 10.30pm on Monday night, neither the BBC nor Guardian mobile websites are mentioning that Gordon Brown has promised to resign … a story that their web news pages are unsurprising leading with – and have been doing so for several hours.
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Since the first TV election debate, Nick Clegg has started to be taken seriously by the newspapers (or else has been the victim of a series of hatchet jobs, depending on your point of view).
The charts how the number of stories about Nick Clegg has soared in The Sun, The Daily Mail and The Guardian – even allowing for the fact general election is on.
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Adam Sherk recently pointed out that Twitter drives less than 1% of traffic to US newspaper and magazine sites (but noted that this still makes it “a top 25 referrer for all the [10 sites he asked] and top 10 referrers for most”).
Trying my luck somewhat, I asked people from the three largest UK newspaper sites (the Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Guardian) what their figures were.
* For the Mail, under 0.5% of their referrer traffic is from Twitter.
* For the Telegraph, 0.5% of global traffic and 0.25% of uk traffic currently comes from twitter.
* For the Guardian, 0.4% of their page impressions in February came from Twitter.
John Terry’s been “nobbing” Wayne Bridge’s girlfriend as one of the edits on Wikipedia puts it. Terry got a superinjunction forbidding publication of this story – and of the fact that there was an injunction. This all fell apart on Friday. The case raises some interesting issues:
Despite the superinjunction, you could find out about the [...]
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Tanya Gold has written some anti-iPhone drivel in the Guardian. I’m not going to link to it or its 17 questions. (Nothing to say? Why not ask lots of questions? Is that a good idea?)
But wait. What’s that in the advertising slots on the page? Oh, yes, an advert for the Guardian’s iPhone app.
Read the full post ...UK national newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but the rate is getting slower and slower, according to the latest figures for the 129 accounts I’m tracking. November to December growth was just 6.6%, down from 17% earlier in the year.
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The Guardian has changed its comment system – moving from a client-side system to a server-side one.
With the old system, once you loaded a page, some javascript would go off and look up the comments and display them. This wasn’t terribly accessible – if you couldn’t or didn’t run javascript, you couldn’t see the comments. It was also bad for SEO, as search engines couldn’t run the javascript. And if your mobile didn’t run javascript (like mine), you couldn’t read the comments either.
Read the full post ...Newspaper Twitter accounts are continuing to grow – but at an ever slower rate, according to the latest figures for the 130 accounts I’m tracking. October to November growth was just 8.3%.
Read the full post ...June 2009 saw the Mail Online unexpectedly overtake both the Guardian and Telegraph in the ABCes, partly on the back of US traffic and Michael Jackson stories.
Fast forward to September and the story is the same as earlier in the year – Guardian first, Telegraph second and Mail third. So what’s changed? To find out, I’ve compared the ABCe figures for UK and foreign visitors in June and in September. The difference between the Guardian’s performance and that of the Telegraph and Mail is revealing.
Read the full post ...Having failed to stop the Guardian reporting an MP asking a question about Trafigura and the injunction concerning the Minton report, Carter Ruck is making a second attempt to gag Parliament.
Read the full post ...National UK newspapers had 1,665,202 followers of their Twitter accounts at the start of October – an increase of 193,266 on September 1st (when they had 1,471,936).
The rate of growth has slowed, however. This is a monthly increase of 13.1%, compared with 17% from August 1 to September 1, and also from July 1 to August 1.
Read the full post ...I posted yesterday about the shameful reporting of the tragic death of a girl who died on the same day as getting the cervical cancer vaccine – and how, without any evidence of a link, the papers were giving the impression that the vaccine, which will save hundreds of lives a year, is unsafe.
So, how are the papers covering the news that, as the BBC news site puts it in its 3rd most important story “Cancer jab ‘unlikely’ death cause: A girl who died shortly after being given a cervical cancer vaccine had a ’serious underlying medical condition’, an NHS Trust says”?
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The UK media have learned nothing from the debacle over the MMR vaccine – where they relentlessly covered stories doubting the safety of MMR, putting the lives of children at risk.
They are continuing their habit of undermining public-health initiatives with their latest scare story about the safety of the cervical cancer jab, after the tragic [...]
I just tweeted that I was finding it hard to resist the temptation to be the first to sidewiki the home page of UK newspapers. (Sidewiki is Google’s new way to let you see what other users have said about a page while you look at it).
It looks like I’m too late as the Mail already has been sidewikied as this picture shows.
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Patrick Swayze has died. So has Keith Floyd.
So no surprise that UK newspapers are rushing to publish as many news stories as they can on the subject to try to appear multiple times in the news and web search results, even if some of the pages are very similar.
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Google’s logo over the weekend showed one of its Os being abducted by aliens, triggering an SEO scrap among UK newspapers, which the Telegraph won.
Read the full post ...National UK newspaper accounts had 1,471,936 followers at the start of September, an increase of 213,892 or 17% on August 1 (when they had 1,258,044 followers).
You can see the September figures in the table.
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I’m giving up comparing websites using Alexa.com’s data. Checking the accuracy of Alexa data using ABCe numbers led me to believe they were good enough to rely on. But the Times reckons the Alexa numbers in my latest post relating to referrals from the BBC were rubbish – and the Guardian agrees.
Read the full post ...The Guardian has more bookmarks on Delicious than any other UK newspaper according to Quarkbase. There are nearly 11,000 bookmarks for the Guardian, with the Times in 2nd (3,944) and the Independent 3rd (3,196).
Read the full post ...Can’t decide whether to watch a film? If you’re searching online for a current film review, the Telegraph is winning the SEO battle.
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