Newspaper ABCes
Soaring online user figures offer solace - and challenges
Jemima Kiss
The Guardian,
Monday February 25 2008

Even given meteoric online readership trends, January's results from the ABCe are remarkable. The Mail Online's unique user numbers increased 165% year on year to 17,903,172. In the same period, Telegraph.co.uk increased 65% to 12,348,706; Sun Online grew to 13,322,535, up 40% from January 2007, and Times Online increased 39% to 15,087,130. Guardian.co.uk remained the highest traffic website with 19,708,711, a rise of 26% year on year.

Beyond the headline figures for the five newspaper websites that publish their monthly traffic data through the official industry auditor, however, the online data is characteristically complex. As much as the results will provide some comfort to newspaper executives watching their print sales ebb away, they also present a challenge to news organisations now publishing to a global audience.

Of the Mail's online audience, a staggering 72.3% - or 12.9 million users - are outside the UK. Those of both Sun Online and Times Online are around 62%, with the Guardian and Telegraph around 56%.

Most news sites have concentrated on their UK audience because that is where their commercial operations are focused and advertisers are comfortable. Few sites have established deals with localised advertising firms to roll out more relevant and valuable advertising, although Reuters last week started selling ads that will be seen by guardian.co.uk users in the US. Stephen Miron, managing director of the Mail on Sunday, said the majority of the Mail's overseas web traffic comes from the US.

"Clearly we think there is huge potential to monetise and explore the other side of the Atlantic, and we're analysing how we can do that," he said. "The UK does showbusiness and entertainment exceptionally well. We're more honest and don't have the same agenda as the US media."

Miron said that there hasn't been an "aggressive push" of the site's content, with no money spent on search engine marketing or stories designed to fit with the most popular search terms each day. Instead, he says, the site has pushed to the forefront without even trying to "put its foot flat to the floor".

Mail Online's dramatic traffic increase has intrigued the rest of the industry, who have watched its unique user figures accelerate since it started publishing its results through ABCe in August last year. The site's entertainment-led stories and celebrity picture galleries are driving much of the growth. Stories on the decline and occasional rise of Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears, along with the death of Heath Ledger, were big hitters, alongside the rest of the Mail's core Femail stories on Kate Moss, dieting and makeovers.

Sun Online has seen a similar sensation, with its video of Amy Winehouse allegedly smoking crack cocaine contributing to 9m video views last month. Sun Online's editor, Pete Picton, said the site's brief is to focus on the UK for the same reasons as the Mail - although last month, nearly 4 million people overseas viewed the site's showbusiness coverage alone.
Picton credits the site's showbiz editor Simon Rothstein with a big push on the stories that have international appeal. "The Sun should be on as many platforms as possible and, by the same token, theoretically, the Sun brand can be leveraged outside the UK. Showbiz is an area where lots of stories are global."

Online coverage from the Sun and Mail's sites competes with influential celebrity blogs such as PerezHilton.com and TMZ.com. Despite having the resources of a big news operation, it is still hard for the papers' sites to compete with the blogs' agility; TMZ reportedly has a team of 20 writers, while Sun Online has a full-time showbiz team of two. Does the site need to become more niche to compete with these sites? "The Sun is not about being niche," said Picton. "We go for the big stories that will be big traffic drivers."

For Times Online, Telegraph.co.uk and guardian.co.uk, many of those big stories have involved the US presidential primaries. As well as operating in the highly competitive UK newspaper market, sites are now competing with broadcasters, web video sites and blogs, and also with US news sites.

On Times Online, coverage of the presidential race has rarely been out of the site's top 10 stories. Editor-in-chief Anne Spackman said the site has seen those stories surge in both the US and the UK. "US readers come to us because we have cracking good stories, and we get those because we are so competitive with each other. That competitive climate means we get stories that no one else has. We also have that British voice that they respect."

Guardian.co.uk now has a Washington-based newsroom that allows the site to cover the elections round-the-clock, and, according to director of digital content Emily Bell, the site has the high-end readership of the New York Times in its sights.

The market for quality coverage is as strong as ever - but, despite strong growth in international user numbers, publishers have barely begun to expand the infrastructure of their businesses in a way that allows them to capitalise on this growth. With user numbers still far from saturation point, this is an issue that will only become more urgent.