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.
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 ...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 [...]
The Mirror has removed some of the links to MoneyExtra that I recently warned looked like paid-for links added for SEO reasons (which would put them in breach of Google’s guidelines).
Of the 11 pages I pointed out: 5 contained links to the MoneyExtra credit card page – 4 have had the MoneyExtra links removed …
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However, the Mirror wants to beware how its links look. Let’s take a look at a few pages – stories which share these characteristics:
* All contain exactly three links to a MoneyExtra page.
* All three links use different anchor text.
* The text happens to be competitive search terms.
* And MoneyExtra isn’t mentioned in the article itself.
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.
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 ...There are more than 100,000 citations on Wikipedia that reference the Guardian – more than twice as much as any other UK national newspaper. The FT is way down the list – barely higher than the Sun.
Read the full post ...Visitors to UK newspaper sites look at an average of 2.5 pages a day, according to data from Alexa. And 62.8% of users look at just one page. Only the Sun (4 pages/day per user), Guardian (3.1) and Telegraph (2.9) come out above average in terms of daily page views per user.
Read the full post ...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%.
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With 981,359 followers, @Guardiantech is closing in on a million, as I reveal the latest figures for UK newspaper Twitter accounts. @GuardianTech has jumped 150,000 followers in a month. @TimesFashion (29,190 followers) has moved up one place to 2nd, overtaking @GuardianNews (27,802) which is now 3rd.
Read the full post ...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%.
Read the full post ...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.
Read the full post ...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.
Read the full post ...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 …
Read the full post ...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.
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