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The Independent gains online market share in the UK
April 09, 2008
Earlier this year we highlighted the growth of newspaper websites in the UK. As the chart below illustrates, the market share of the UK Independent, which has traditionally lagged behind most of its rivals online, has more doubled over the last twelve months. It was the seventh most visited website in our News and Media – Print in March putting it behind the Daily Mail, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Guardian and FT, but ahead of the Mirror and Express
One of the key factors in this growth is the amount of traffic the site is getting from other news sources. The number of visits that the Independent receives from Google News (UK and US versions) has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months (the news aggregator now accounts for one in every 25 visits), while there has also been a significant increase in the amount of traffic that Social Networks and Email services send to the site.
However, as the chart above illustrates, the real change has been the amount of traffic that the paper receives from search engines. An increase in paid search activity has played a role – the proportion of paid search traffic has increased from 1% in November last year to 11% last month – but the key to the Independent’s success seems to be more effective organic search engine optimisation (SEO). Searches for the term ‘independent’ are actually on the decline, and the proportion of traffic that the site sites receives from its main brand term has fallen by 84% since November. But, at the same time, the number of distinct search terms sending traffic to the Independent has increased from under 1,000 in November to over 10,000 in March.
A good sign that the Independent is picking up more relevant hits as a result of improved search traffic is the decline in ‘leakage’ to its competitors. As the chart below illustrates, the amount of traffic that the site sends to other News and Media sites declined notably between Nowember and March. However, the Independent still lags behind its main competitors in one key area: average session time. Although this has increased slightly over the last few months, at 3 minutes 32 seconds in March its lags behind the other broadsheets (all of which are currently over 5 minutes), and the Financial Times, which leads the newspaper market with an average session time of nearly nine minutes.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 02:52 PM
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Comments
Hi dramroll - thanks for the comment.
There are a couple of important differences between our data and ABCe's that I should point out. Firstly, we count internet visits from users in the UK, rather than unique users (we do also count page impressions, but they are not included in this data). I'm not completely au fait with the ABCe numbers, but my assumption is that if they have 19.5 million users for the Guardian, then they are including international traffic as well as traffifc from the UK, whereas for these stats we are looking at UK usage only. Also there is a difference between visits and unique ussrs - we believe that our visits metric offers a better picture of how a popular a site really is, as it takes into account customer loyalty and return visits rather than just the number of people that have used the site at least once in a month.
The other major difference is methodology. The ABCe figures are based on a survey / panel of users and then extrapolated to end up with the final figure, whereas our data is based on monitoring data collected directly from ISPs. Our sample includes 8.43m UK internet users, equivalent to 1/3 of total the online population. Becasue of this approach, we are also able provide data on a near real time based - reporting on daily internet usage - whereas data from panel-based companies is typically delayed. Therefore, it may be possible that the ABCe data doesen't yet mirror the Independent's recent growth - as you can see from the fist chart, the site has gained significant market share since its January redesign.
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | April 16, 2008 08:31 AM
Robin, two points if I amy:
When they redesigned their website, the Independent broke inbound hyperlinks to their news section. Are you aware whether this has cost them any significant amounts of traffic? I for one simply stopped linking to them - but I'm small.
You justify your methodology re: ABCe:
>The other major difference is methodology. The ABCe figures are based on a survey / panel of users and then extrapolated to end up with the final figure, whereas our data is based on monitoring data collected directly from ISPs. Our sample includes 8.43m UK internet users, equivalent to 1/3 of total the online population.
You're statement seems to be incorrect. The ABCe figures are based on analysis of logfiles not a panel (which is perhaps why it costs a fortune to do):
"We verify the measurement of traffic activity to
a site (a declared domain, set of domains and/or set of URLs), using metrics based on globally agreed industry definitions. The source data for the metric totals is the information contained in log files of servers measuring the content in question. Sites may use their original server log files, or use tagging technology (designed in house or provided by web analytics companies such as some of our Associate Subscribers) to collect this source data. "
Source:http://www.abce.org.uk/cgi-bin/gen5?runprog=abce/abce&noc=y
Your comments re: international and UK visitors in ABCe are spot on if I recall correctly. I think the major newspaper sites have 60-70% of their unique visitors from abroad.
Rgds
Posted by Matt Wardman | April 18, 2008 04:21 AM
Thanks Matt - I stand corrected with regards to the ABCe data collection methodology! However, as you mention, their data differs from ours in that it includes a significant amount of international traffic.
With regards to the linking, I looked out our upstream clickstream traffic, which lists all of the sites visits before a site. While not all of these upstream sites will contain links (sometimes its simply a case of someome visiting site a before site b), the number of upstream sites is still a good indicator as to the number of inbound links.
The number of upstream sites visits before the Independent more than trebled from 2,167 in December 7,479 in March, so looks like the number of inbound links did increase. This would tie in with the growth in organic search traffic.
Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | April 18, 2008 12:02 PM
Robin
Thanks for your reply.
Out of interest, my own site mattwardman.com shows 3703 distinct search terms during February. My next meaningful figures will be in May, since we had a hacker problem covering the March/April boundary.
The distribution is very flat indeed. Looking at the pareto point, the top 71% of search terms account for 80% of visits from search engines; talk about "Long tail".
Note that I have not combined similar terms - in extremis "wikileaks schillings" is treated as different to "wikileaks schilling".
Rgds
Matt
with only one term over
Posted by Matt Wardman | April 21, 2008 06:05 AM
One more titbit. My "upstream site" numbers come out at just over 750 in February.
This is for just on 30k absolute uniques, from log files using "Deep Log Analyzser" software.
Posted by Matt Wardman | April 21, 2008 06:16 AM
Have you checked ABC Electronic providing audited figures of web site in UK, though Independent is not certified? According to it, Guardian is top with 19.5 million for unique users and The Sun is top with 230 million for page impressions.
So I'm not comfortable with your comment of "It was the seventh most visited website in our News and Media – Print in March putting it behind the Daily Mail, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Guardian and FT", as according to ABCe the order should be Guardian, Daily Mail, Times, Sun, Telegraph and FT.
Posted by dramroll | April 15, 2008 09:13 PM