The Internet Makes National Newspapers Truly International

Philip M. Stone September 28, 2007

The UK’s national newspapers have always been ferociously competitive in print throughout the country. But now they are ferociously competitive on the Internet globally. But can they make money from that global brand?

Leading the pack is the Guardian that recorded 15,821,480 users in August, a 26.35% increase year –on-year, according to Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCE).  In comparison, the most popular US newspaper web site is the New York Times’ that records some 13 million unique visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

But the fastest growing UK newspaper web site is the Mail Online with 11,585,134 users – a 75% annual growth, with the Daily Telegraph’s site with its 9,770,562 unique visitors not far behind in annual growth recording 64%. Rupert Murdoch’s Sun Online has now passed the 10 million unique bar, and whether it is because of its Page 3 naked girls or whatever, each user accesses about 23 pages a month, more than double any UK newspaper competitor. The Sun’s 10,594,198 unique users is a 36% increase year-on-year, and its “quality” stable mate, The Times is close behind with 10,239,223 users.

What a difference the Internet makes. The ABC reported for the Guardian, for instance, that its August average daily print circulation was 442,646 and yet here is its Internet presence approaching 16 million users a month. What is a quality newspaper that consistently comes in third in circulation within its ABC UK print category is absolutely the top of all UK newspapers by a long way when it comes to Internet branding.

Only three of the sites break down their UK and International users, but those numbers are quite startling for in all cases they have more foreign visitors than they do domestic UK. For the Sun, 55% of its users are from outside the UK, at the Times it is up to 63% and for the Mail it is a full 75%, and there is no reason to believe that similar percentages will not be true for the other sites once they start breaking down the domestic/international usage.

The two big questions for the UK nationals, however, is how do they monetize that foreign readership and why are people reading their sites, for once they know the answer to the latter then they can do more of it and get even more international readers.

Actually, it’s not too difficult these days for a news site to make money from an international audience. Regular readers of ftm will have noticed that in recent weeks we have adapted to the advertising model but we have done it in such a way that the ad server recognizes the country of origin of the IP address accessing the site, and it then sends out advertising targeted at that country. Thus, we in Switzerland may well see advertising, for instance, for Credit Suisse, whereas someone in the UK could well see, instead, an ad for a British bank, and in the US for an American bank, and so on.

If those UK newspapers just send out ads targeted at their UK audiences and are bypassing their foreign visitors then while all those international readers are nice to have and make for great marketing spin, they don’t really add to the bottom line.

And why are so many people outside the UK reading UK newspaper sites. Listen to the UK editors and they’ll tell you it’s because of their style of writing, a different outlook to what readers may have in their own country, and so on. There may be some Commonwealth traffic from such countries as India, but in ftm ’s view much of the international traffic is down to plain old links, and one US link in particular.

ftm has written before about Matt Drudge, based in Miami. Not many people have a lot of good things to say about him but the fact is, according to Hitwise that measures Internet activity, “Drudge Report” is the ninth most frequent search term in the US that sends traffic to a “News and Media site and The Drudge Report is the seventh most popular news and media website in the US (Yahoo! News is tops).

And Drudge in recent months just seems to have loved Daly Mail stories and he also seems to keep a keen eye on The Sun. It’s no wonder, therefore, that those two UK papers in particular have seen such growth over the last 12 months. The Daily Telegraph’s digital editor said that in July he counted 36 Daily Mail stories linked by Drudge – that’s more than one a day. 

Not too many web sites can boast of Drudge’s more than 14 million visitors in a 24-hour period, around 400 million a month and some 4.8 billion a year. Even the Washington Post admits that Drudge is its largest driver of traffic.

Even if Drudge doesn’t list a particular story from a UK newspaper he provides links on his site to the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror (with a separate link to the Mirror’s 3 AM Girls gossip page), Daily Record, Evening Standard, Daily Express, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, the free Thelondonpaper, The News of the World, The Star, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, and The Times.

Mostly the stories he links to are oddball of some sort – the British just love their oddball stories such as an August  link “Jeering mob of children stoned father to death as he played cricket” – but at times he links to very serious pieces such as on Thursday with The Independent’s account of what was happening in Myanmar (Burma).  Maybe that was why the Independent’s web site was slow to access.

Drudge has also been influential via his radio show on Sunday nights, carried by more than 200 stations across America. But he has announced the program this Sunday will be his last – he says he wants to concentrate on his web activities and with the US election season already in full swing the Washington establishment will have his screen on all day, refreshing automatically every five minutes,  such is his influence.

Although it has never been confirmed it has been said that the New York Times sometimes slips Drudge a preview of a major story so he will list it prominently on his site. That might be a marketing ploy the UK newspapers might want to think about, too.

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