Online/offline news blur

Posted Monday, February 26, 2007 at 8:13pm in Blogging, Media, PR General  | 

UPDATE

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise elaborates far better than I ever could.

Following on from my post yesterday, two pieces from the Guardian and New Media Age caught my eye today. Both illustrate the blurring of online and offline news and how the media is merging (Note: I, like many others, don’t believe new media kills old media) into one.

The Media Guardian reports that the Guardian website recorded a record number of hits to its website in January. 15.7 million people visited the Guardian website in January alone with 5.3 million unique users coming from the UK. From what I gather from the story, this is the first time unique user stats have been certified from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Although, the Guardian, along with the Times Online and the Sun, are the only nationals to release their web traffic stats.

It doesn’t take a mathematician (or a theoretical physicist) to predict that the Guardian will break its own record in the coming months.

New Media Age reports that the Financial Times online ad sales has increased 30 per cent with profits from the newspaper and the FT.com website moving from £9 million to £11 million. It probably comes as no surprise that, as more and more people get their news online, the advertisers shall follow. And remember, online news is relevant and recycled.

And here’s a couple of graphs to show how news from large media outlets is filtering into the smaller but larger in quantity new media outlets. P.S. I don’t think I should have to explain the keywords but notice the conversation volume spikes on particular dates:

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Sidenote: The Daily Star have launched their first blog. It’s written by Hot’s Joe Mott.

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Techmeme and the Newspaper of the Future « Screenwerk

Thursday, March 1, 2007 at 7:56pm

[...] Heather Hopkins of Hitwise posts about UK online news trends: Yesterday’s announcement that the Financial Times has seen a 30% increase in online sales is good news for print media brands. I agree with the sentiments of PR blogger that online doesn’t kill print media brands, and our data backs that up. Print media websites were among the fastest growing categories last year, keeping pace with the News and Media parent category with visits up 28% year on year in January. However, challenging times lie ahead as more and more consumers turn to nimble social media websites for news and analysis as we’ll explore in the next post in this series on Competition 2.0. [...]

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