BBC Magazines joins ABCe reporting

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 August 2007 at 11:17
Tags: ABCe, BBC

When the magazine ABC figures are (officially) released on Thursday, BBC Magazines will become the first consumer magazine publisher to release an ABC Group Product Report combining web site ABCe figures available along with magazine ABC figures.

BBC Magazines will provide online traffic figures for Top Gear and Radio Times.

There’s little doubt that this will provide them with some good news to report. In its most recent published ABCe figure, for May 2007, TopGear.com had 1.08 unique users, up 12 per cent year-on-year. Radio Times magazine and RadioTimes.com will also be included. In May, RadioTimes.com had 1.2m unique users in May 2006, up a massive 87.4 per cent year-on-year.

BBC Magazines will also be providing a group product report combining magazine and events data for Gardeners World and the BBC Food Group’s magazines and events.

Indy joins monthly ABCe reporting

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 12:14
Tags: ABCe, Independent

The Independent’s web site will join its broadsheet rivals in revealing its ABCe web traffic figures each month, Revolution reported this week.

This is very good news — hopefully the other newspapers web sites will take the same approachh. So far only the Guardian, Sun, Times, and Telegraph reveal their ABCe-audited server-centric web site traffic data each month, and the lack of a uniform metric makes it difficult to make comparisons about the sites’ relative growth.

While no audited server log data is available for the Indy, user-centric data like that provided by online market research firm Nielsen/Netratings gives some indication of where the Indy stands in the online news universe.

According to Netratings, Independent.co.uk has a monthly UK audience of 706,000 — still furlongs behind Guardian Unlimited (2.37m), The Sun Online (1.98m), Times Online (1.73m) Telegraph.co.uk (1.59m) and even DailyMail.co.uk (1.1m).

Still, the Indy may have good reason to start revealing its audited web traffic figures. The Netratings data shows that Independent.co.uk could currently be Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper web site. Despite starting from a relatively low base, the Indy was up 54.5 per cent since last October, the first month Netratings figures were available.

Earlier this year, Indy editor-in-chief Simon Kelner told the Guardian that the site was being redesigned with “bells and whistles attached to it”. So watch this space.

Sky News site claims traffic spike for flood coverage

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 11:54
Tags: ABCe, Sky News

Sky News’s web site claims to have recorded a 58 per cent year-on-year increase in traffic in July because of its flood coverage.

Sky News says the site, Sky.com/News, had 4.8 million unique users in July, up from 3m last July, its highest traffic figures since the London bombings two years ago. Time spent on the site was up 15 per cent, Sky claimed.

The surge included 7.5 million page impressions on 23 July alone, says Sky.

Sky.com has been publishing its ABCe audits every month since mid-2004, but has not included breakout data for the Sky News section of the site since May 2005, when the Sky News site had 1.50m unique users.

In March, the last audit period before the site relaunched on 19 April, Sky News claimed the site had 3.47m unique users, or 18 per cent of Sky.com’s 19m audited uniques that month.

In the Ajax age, the pageview is a dying metric

Posted by Martin Stabe on 10 July 2007 at 15:22
Tags: ABCe, Ajax, Nielsen, metrics, video

In the latest move in the eternal debate about the most appropriate metrics for measuring web sites’ readership, the Internet market research firm Nielsen/Netratings has added new time-based metrics to its profiles.

The Internet market research firm has added “total minutes” and “total sessions” alongside existing “average time per person” and “average number of sessions per person” to the metrics it records for web sites.

Because of the growing use of technologies that allow users to obtain large amounts of information from a single page, online pundits have long been predicting “the death of the pageview” as an online media metric. This certainly appears to be another step in that direction.

Ajax-based web development is allowing content to be refreshed while users remain on a single page. Playing a streaming audio or video file also provide far more user engagement than the single pageview they record would suggest.

The pageview metric “under-credits such engagement”, Nielsen/Netratings said in a statement today. By contrast, a time-based metrics allow a measurement of user engagement that is independent of the technologies used in different sites’ design.

The big winners when applying the new metrics are web-based instant messenger applications, multimedia players, and social networking sites with large, loyal user base.

Among news sites, a shift time-based metrics rewards news organizations like CNN, whose recent Ajax-heavy redesign probably sacrificed pageviews for usability. Its tabbed story pages allow users to move between different media while remaining on the same page.

Hopefully de-emphasising pageviews will discourage bad design practices developed to inflate pageview figures, such as linear photo galleries where dozens of pictures are posted on separate pages with buttons herding users through endless refreshes. Good riddance.

See also: Shane Richmond at Telegraph.co.uk.

Is a new metric needed for newspaper web stats?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 25 June 2007 at 08:00
Tags: ABCe, Online

The standard metric for measuring newspaper websites’ traffic statistics could be changed to daily unique users, Journalism.co.uk reports.

Speaking on Friday at a conference organised by the Association of Online Publishers, ABCe chief executive Richard Foan said daily figures would allow publishers to better reflect fluctuations in traffic over the course of a month. The propsal will be discussed by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (JICWEBS) when it meets in August.

Former Observer managing editor John Duncan, now a media strategy consultant, has recently argued on his blog that the monthly unique user metric misleadingly overstates the importance of newspapers’ online readership figures.

Simon Waldman, Guardian Media Group’s director of digital strategy and president of the AOP, wrote in January that a daily unique users figure would be the most comparable to print circulation figures, and said these figures should be used more often.

Monthly ABCe figures for broadcasters’ streaming content?

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 June 2007 at 13:42
Tags: ABCe, BBC, Channel 4, Five, ITV, Television

Broadcast is reporting that a working party of leading broadcasters, including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Five, Sky has tasked ABCe to “provide basic statistical reports using agreed criteria” about streaming media on their web sites.

The working party also includes the broadcast ratings organisation Barb and the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising.

Broadcast says ABCe reports will be available by the end of the year, and describes the move as “the industry’s first step toward the holy grail of online audience measurement”.