The latest figures for UK users from the audited ABCes together with Compete‘s figures for American site usage show how USA traffic is vital for UK newspaper sites (figures originally posted here).
On average, US traffic is 36.8% of the UK traffic (ie there is just over one US visitor for every 3 UK visitors). The figure for the Telegraph is slightly higher (44.5%) and for the Mail it’s a massive 62.5%.
| Newspaper site |
USA visitors (Compete) |
UK visitors (ABCe) |
US users as % of UK |
| Daily Mail | 5,199,078 | 8,316,083 | 62.5 |
| Telegraph | 4,087,769 | 9,184,082 | 44.5 |
| Times Online | 2,805,815 | 7,668,637 | 36.6 |
| Guardian | 3,676,498 | 10,211,385 | 36.0 |
| Independent | 1,317,298 | 3,781,320 | 34.8 |
| The Sun | 2,419,319 | 8,704,036 | 27.8 |
| Mirror | 748,098 | 4,907,540 | 15.2 |
| FT.com | 5,960,589 | n/a | n/a |
| Express | 63,216 | n/a | n/a |
| Average | 2,919,742 | 7,539,012 | 36.8 |
These figures are all for June 2009. The FT wasn’t audited in June’s ABCes. The Express isn’t in the ABCes. I had planned to use Alexa data but Compete seems a bit more robust.
The figures are further proof that the Mail’s success in the June ABCes was driven by American searches for Michael Jackson’s kids.
Online Journalism Blog 
Success needs revenue. And the problem most of the papers have is that domestic advertisers don’t want these users.
There are companies, like adgent, who are selling this international traffic, but I’d be wary of claiming that international traffic is vital for their success
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Surprised the Guardian’s percentage isn’t higher, especially after they recently launched their Guardian America website – unless the stats for that site are counted separately ?
Zak – no, they should be in there as it’s on guardian.co.uk/america isn’t it?
http://www.guardianamerica.com seems to redirect to the .co.uk address, so I think you’re right. Seems they need to write more about Jacko’s kids if they want the traffic!
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A lot of sites suffer from this issue but at about 20%, which creates signiifcant difficulties from monitarising the advertising reveneue for that percnetage.
The daily mail has suxch a high figuer because
One there subject is matter is one what americans are searching for ( more royal family, american celeb news/trvia etc, less UK sport)
but more importantly what american comentators like to link to, the daily mail does very well in the google.com rankings because its well linked to from the likes of drudge, that both sends traffic and boosts it in th US google rankings.
“Richard” – it would be easier to take your comments seriously if you weren’t obviously pretending your name is richard sharpe to link to your richard-sharpe-books website on a dofollow blog. I see your name is Jon from your email address. How about using that instead?
Malcolm,
Sorry it is somethign I have preset on forums for a little bit of SEO link buuilding on a side project.
What does it hurt Jon or Richard Sharpe you dont really know me anyway?
But the info is good, its stuff I researched when I did some SEO consultancy in the journalism area 2 years ago.
Jon – no worries 😉 It’s just this site gets a lot of people leaving comments just for the link, some of whom take the effort to write a little more than ‘nice post’, so it’s hard to know who to take seriously sometimes …
Well your ‘no follow’ on out going links should sort that issue out, but usually even if I am link building on do follow blogs, I want to leave a quality post that adds something to debate, also means the comment and the link stays there.
Anyway on the main point of the article it is interesting how are right wing press does much better in the states than our left wing press.
It also does affect the commercials on advertsing revenue a paper can generate.
A Uk visitor to a Uk paper is worth much more thna an american visitor to a Uk paper, so 62 % of the mails potentail advertsing reveneue is low value.
Or you could spin it on its head and say the mail returns 5,000,000 extra visitors it can generate some reveneue on, which they would not otherwise have.
Jon – the nofollow gets lifted after a couple of days 😉
On the ads thing, there’s some calculations here about what some of these visitors are worth (reply from me further down).
Malc –
Don’t admit that in public, you will get spammed more :).
I am glad to post my views and points in this blog, but I must say that webmaster of this blog has done a very great job to make his blog more informative and more discussable but unfortunately everything is same here that more than 80% in this and other blogs post their comments for making spam!!!, so i will really all this spam links to google band tool, because webmaster makes blogs for making discuss and for sloving each other problems.
thanks
Good, site have learned more through this site than I have through months of reading search engine optimisation and reading how to gain links books. Prehaps you can give me me some advice on how to get my wiltshire based web company to the top of search engines – help to get me comments/links and to my site?
Excellent site, keep up the good work. I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say I’m glad I found your blog. Thanks,
A definite great read…
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