About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.

Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

« “Money Saving Expert” Martin Lewis the most searched-for personality in the UK | What are we scared of? »

The Sun and the Baby Father

February 19, 2009

According to Journalism.co.uk, the Sun’s February 13th story about the 13 year old ‘baby father’ Alfie Patten became the newspaper’s most popular online article of all time. As the chart below illustrates, the Sun’s market share of UK Internet visits to our News and Media - Print category reached an all time of 8.48% last Friday, overtaking the Daily Mail for the first time since September.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_the_sun_baby_father_2009_2008_chart.png

After the story broke, people heard about it in other media and began to search for more information. ’13 year old dad’ was the sixth biggest search term sending traffic to the Sun last week, and the highest ranked non-branded term. As the chart below illustrates, two more of the newspaper’s top 10 search terms last week - ‘dad at 13’ and ’13 year old father’ – were also related to the story. The Sun also backed this up with a paid search campaign, although most of the traffic came from organic sources.

The_sun_search_terms_13_year_old_dad_father_February_2009_table.png

The Sun also experienced a significant increase in the amount of traffic it received as a result of the story. As the chart below illustrates, on February 13th 1 in every 6 of the newspaper’s visits came from a social networking site. The Sun received more than twice as many visits from social network sites as any of its rivals. Facebook accounted for almost half of these, while the social network site sending the fifth largest amount of traffic to the Sun was Bounty, which describes itself as ‘the UK’s favourite parenting club’.

The_sun_upstream_traffic_from_social_networks_facebook_2009_chart.png