Telegraph.co.uk gets 8% of its traffic from social sites 16
Telegraph.co.uk gets an astonishing 8% of its visitors from social sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and Stumbleupon, Julian Sambles, Head of Audience Development, has revealed to me.
The figure's much higher than anyone previously thought - and helps explain how the Telegraph is now the most popular UK newspaper site.
Almost 75,000 unique visitors a day
Telegraph's Digg widget
The Telegraph got about 28 million unique visitors in March, which means social sites are sending it almost 75,000 unique visitors a day.
Julian gave me the figure in response to some questions for an article I wrote for Fumsi about social news and bookmarking sites.
He also told me that search engines are responsible for about a third of the Telegraph's traffic he also revealed - or about 300,000 unique visitors a day.
Telegraph's engagement with social sites
The 8% figure shows:
- How important social sites are becoming as a source of traffic.
- And how well the Telegraph has engaged with them, with functionality like its Digg widget (EG see my post 'Telegraph tops Digg list') and Twitterfall box (despite the recent Twackdown with the Guardian).
Driving traffic to 500 articles a day
"We at the Telegraph publish approx 500 articles every day covering a wide range of subjects and topics from breaking news events through to film and hotel reviews," Julian told me.
"All of these articles can be found by coming to our site but relying on this alone will limit the size of our audience. By working on how this content can be distributed and found in the digital world we can (and have) greatly increased the audience that reads our rich content.
Telegraph's football Twitter stream
The Telegraph's approach
"Social websites such as Digg, Reddit, and Fark allow members to choose and identify stories that they like.
"What we have done is to enable all of our stories to be submitted to these social sites by adding a 'share this' button on every article.
"In each case they can then add their own headline and comments onto the article so enabling their point of view to get across.
"By continuing to deliver a large volume of good, rich content we have found that our readers enjoy engaging with it."
Two recent examples he gave from Digg were:
- Drug Murders And Gold Machine Guns In Mexico PICS
- IMF to Create Billions of Dollars Worth of Super Currency
Continued engagement
He went on to say that "We have successfully engaged with these social sites and will continue to incorporate tools and services that allow readers to interact and engage with our content when we make changes to our site.
"As with SEO, social media functionality and tools are a consideration in the design and build of our site and we encourage our readers to interact with our content.
"We are open at the Telegraph and try to communicate with the social networks directly and work with them on developing products and services that will help and engage with their members. An example of this is the implementation of the digg widget in the How About That section of our website.
"In the changing role of newspapers in the digital world it is important that we have the ability to adapt and engage with new services and social media to ensure that our great content reaches as many people who are interested in reading it."
Thanks to Julian
A massive thanks to Julian for taking the time to answer my questions, and giving such an interesting insight into the Telegraph's successful traffic driving plans. I've pretty much reproduced everything he emailed me here!
I'd be fascinated to know how many clicks they get on their "share this" buttons.
Can't help you there! It's interesting that the Digg one is visible without having to click the 'share this' link - they clearly have a strong relationship with Digg (EG more Diggs than any other newspaper).
The implementation of 'Share This' isn't necesarily the best (EG doesn't show you relaltime numbers for existing submissions) - but maybe they would have too many zeros as they publish so much.
I'm not one to talk, mind - but that's cos noone has ever Digged my blog ...!
I'll Digg your blog for you, Malcolm... if I can figure out how to do so. I'll Smak it, too.
You should add the "AddThis.com" widget. It is nicer than ShareThis.
Where's your Technorati widget?
Where's your "follow" icon?
Best wishes,
Rowena Cherry
Featured "Author Conversation" at http://www.redroom.com/
Cheers, Rowena! (For the rest of you, I pointed out on twitter that my sharethis widget had been used just 13 times in 28,000 page views ...)
I just Digged you!
This is a great example of newspapers harnessing the quality of their content by using sharing technologies.
What would be really interesting is to know how The Telegraph are, or will be, using this information to sell more advertising space on- and off-line.
Some useful statistics. Won't be too much use now until we find out exactly have to interpret the data. That's always the key. Rgds Vince
Interesting. If we take the audited data for March, then that's:
(75,000,000 page views * 31 days)/221,314,060 audited page views or around 1% of the Telegraph's saleable inventory.
Still, being Digg, a lot of that traffic will come from o/s the UK, and will therefore be sold via ad exchanges or run of network. So assuming an optimistic average CPM of $5.00, that's still only (75 * 5) = $375 a day.
Sound about right?
Clearly, I meant "(75,000 page views * 31 days)" -- apologies.
Matt - I think you may have divided apples into pears. Or something.
Julian said 8% of their visitors came from social sites, which I translated into 75,000 visitors. You've turned it back into page views.
Assuming social-media visitors look at the same number of pages as other ones (a big if, I know), then the correct sum is just 8% * 221,314,060 page views a month = about 18 million.
So at a rate of $5 per 1000 page views, that would give $90,000 a month.
On top of that, there's the 2nd order SEO effect of some of those visitors linking to the content, which boosts the site in general.
Malcolm -- you're right. I reckoned that Digg viewers (attracted by an interesting headline) would read a story, then return to Digg for their next fix.
Anecdotal evidence and observed behaviour suggest that users of social news (and Google News) are single page visitors.
I'd be pleased to see any evidence to the contrary. So - I think - would online editors of the various news brands!
I send you guys around 50,000 unique visitors a day.. I hit Telegraph 1-2 times a day on digg FP .
@malcolm
Your if is a big if, deep visitors and social visitors tend to be more interested in the story than the brand, and therefore have a much lower number of average pageviews.
If my memory serves me well we look at somewhere between 20 - 40% less pageviews than a site average, based on one sites figures I went through 2 years ago mind you.