Sun and Mirror Lose Traffic After Failing to Embrace Social Media
While some UK newspapers are going from strength to strength others are suffering falls in traffic.
The Sun Online and Mirror.co.uk saw a drop in traffic numbers throughout September, according to the latest ABCEs.
Mirror.co.uk saw a 5.65% decrease in traffic, dropping from 5.575m visitors to 5.259m visitors, while The Sun Online declined by 1.26% from 15.985m to 15.783m.
By focussing on Worldwide traffic and writing content that Internet users love to share on social networks newspapers such as the Mail, Times, Guardian and Telegraph are surging ahead leaving people like the Sun & Mirror trailing way behind.
Newspapers in the UK struggle to monetise foreign traffic which is why some of them don’t see value in chasing social media traffic. Surely figures like these must be a wake up call?
Websites need to get as much traffic as possible no matter where it’s from. Even if you can’t monetize your foreign visitors directly you can use them for other things like voting for your content on Digg or linking to you from their blogs.
Post category: Social Media Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 7 comments below, or add your own!
The Guardian online’s ‘Comment is Free’ section is particularly web and social media savvy.
Social will win in the end. They will get on board eventually.
Hey Patrick
“Websites need to get as much traffic as possible no matter where it’s from.”
What do you think about english blogs that use translation plugins. I have heard from a couple of sources that those automatically translated posts can drive lots of traffic.
What’s your opinion on it?
I agree. There seems to be a popular myth that international traffic does nothing to help reach a local audience.
In fact, that international audience can boost the availability of content in such a way that more local people will come across it through different channels. People need to get past the idea that they control reach – the audience controls reach. Local and international are the same thing.
They can certainly drive lots of traffic especially if you put the content in folders geotargeted using Google Webmaster Central.
We prefer human translated content though.
Many papers still see their readership as an audience to monetize and to whom is granted as best the right to comment on some forums. The future belong to those papers and magazines that will engage their most engaged and loyal readers to pro-actively participate in the discussion by creating content if not communities on their behalf. This is what the free paper TheOtherSide is doing online on http://www.theothersidemag.co.uk on the Webjam platform available on http://www.webjam.com/branded_services.
DailyMail and Telegraph seem to do a really great job with social media and I’m pretty sure their traffic increased due to it.
1 trackbacks
October 23, 2008 at 4:37pm