Facebook's usage has gone up by 50% as a result of the coronavirus

"The coronavirus has ended up a boon for social media giant Facebook, which saw a 50 percent spike in usage as the virus ate its way through the country’s health and economy.
The usage of the social media network’s numerous features, such as messenger and video calls, has spiked in recent weeks as millions of Americans have had to stay home to avoid the virus. This is a sharp turnaround from not so long ago when the social network seemed to be collecting dust, mostly seeing use from older people as the youth flocked to newer models of social media.
But as of late, Facebook has been seeing increases in news consumption as well, with more than half the articles consumed on the site relating to the virus pandemic. Ranjan Subramanian, a data analyst with the company, talked about the increase in a blog post, calling it “unprecedented.”
The report says the bulk of the increase — over 90 percent — can be credited to what Facebook terms “Power News Consumers” and “Power News Discussers,” who consume and talk about news more than most users of the service. The company, monitoring the activity from that spike fervently, wants to make sure all news put out about the worldwide crisis is as accurate and authoritative as possible — a kind of real-time experiment in how to handle news on social media."

Source:  PYMNTS, 25th March 2020

The Boycott of The Sun in Merseyside 'has led to lower levels of Euroscepticism'

"The report, authored by London School of Economics behavioural political scientist Florian Foos and Zurich University’s Daniel Bischof, says the long-standing Sun boycott lowered Euroscepticism among the “unskilled” working class who “made up a large share of Sun readers before the disaster”.
The report said “attitudes towards the EU got significantly more positive in Merseyside during the boycott”.
Liverpool, The Wirral and Sefton in Merseyside all voted Remain.
The study, which used data from the annual British Social Attitudes survey and is available online, added: “…the boycott of the most important Eurosceptic newspaper – The Sun in Merseyside as a consequence of The Sun’s reporting on the Hillsborough sporting disaster – led to a decrease of Euroscepticism in Merseyside, which we estimate to amount to around 11 percentage points.
“Moreover, our results suggest that The Sun boycott in Merseyside might have decreased the Leave vote share in Merseyside in the 2016 EU referendum.”
The authors said the study showed “sustained media campaigns on emerging issues can have large, lasting, and ultimately, consequential effects on public opinion, and public policy”."
Source:  Press Gazette, 27th August 2019

The Guardian has 655,000 regular monthly supporters

"The Guardian and the Observer have broken even for the first time in recent history aided by record online traffic, reduced costs and increased financial contributions from readers.
Guardian News & Media recorded an £800,000 operating profit for the 2018-19 financial year – compared with a £57m loss three years previously – ensuring the business is existing on a sustainable basis following the culmination of a turnaround programme put in place following years of substantial losses.
The company said it had 655,000 regular monthly supporters across both print and digital, with a further 300,000 people making one-off contributions in the last year alone.
The Guardian has taken the decision to keep its journalism outside a paywall, while asking readers to contribute in order to subsidise its reporting into topics such as Cambridge Analytica, the Windrush scandal, and the Paradise Papers.
Total monthly page views increased over the last three years from 790m in January 2016 to 1.35bn in March 2019."

Source:  The Guardian, 1st May 2019

Note - it's not clear whether the 'regular monthly supporters' includes subscribers - I assume that it does.

The New York Times made profits of over $50m in 2018

"Today’s news that The (failing?) New York Times reported net income of $55.2 million, after losses a year earlier — and that its digital business raked in $709 million — is just one indicator that some of the nation’s oldest media properties are finally crossing the bridge into the 21st century.
The Times managed to turn a profit while employing 1,600 journalists — an all-time high. Fourth-quarter digital advertising revenue increased 22.8 percent, while print advertising revenue decreased 10.2 percent. Digital advertising revenue was $103.4 million, or 53.9 percent of total advertising revenues, compared with $84.2 million, or 46.1 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2017, according to the company.
Those numbers, added to a newly robust Washington Post, a consistently profitable New Yorker and the erection of paywalls  at sites across the vast reaches of the internet, point to a very simple lesson learned — people will pay for quality reporting, videos, personal writing and exclusive information."

Source:  Techcrunch, 6th February 2019

Plus - 'More than 3.3m people pay for NYT digital services, inc news, crosswords and food apps'
"The New York Times Company generated more than $709 million in digital revenue last year, growing at a pace that suggests it will meet its stated goal of $800 million in digital sales by the end of 2020.
The results prompted the company to set another lofty target: “To grow our subscription business to more than 10 million subscriptions by 2025,” Mark Thompson, the chief executive, said in a statement announcing the company’s fourth-quarter financial results.
More than 3.3 million people pay for the company’s digital products, including its news, crossword and food apps, a 27 percent jump from 2017. The total number of paid subscriptions for digital and print reached 4.3 million, a high.
Online subscription revenue gained nearly 18 percent to reach $400 million in 2018, while digital advertising rose 8.6 percent, to $259 million. In the last three months of the year, digital subscription sales grew at a slower pace, about 9 percent, to $105 million. That slowdown was partly the result of an extra week in the fourth quarter of 2017 and partly the result of marketing efforts such as introductory discounts for online access. Those offers attract new readers who bring in less revenue — but the company expects many of them to become full subscribers over time."

Source:  NYT, 6th February 2019

More than a million people have made financial contributions to The Guardian, including 500,000 ongoing

"More than a million people worldwide have contributed to the Guardian in the last three years, with 500,000 paying to support the publication on an ongoing basis, according to Guardian News and Media’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner.
She said the business model was showing a new way for journalism to “regain its relevance, meaning and trusted place in society”."

Source:  The Guardian, 5th November 2018

900,000 people pay for the Guardian through subscriptions, memebership & donations

"The Guardian now gets more revenue from consumers than from advertising. More than 900,000 people pay it through a combination of membership, recurring contributions, print and digital subscriptions and one-off contributions, accounting for 12 percent of the publisher’s total revenue.
Speaking at the Digiday Publishing Summit Europe in Barcelona, Spain, this week, Anna Bateson, chief customer officer at The Guardian, said she sees that 12 percent figure rising to around 20 percent of the publisher’s total. Unlike advertising, which can be limited by market borders, donations have a more global scope — contributions come equally from the U.K., U.S. and the rest of the world. But the publisher has to overcome payment friction and learn more about what drives donations.
“It’s a revenue stream we can believe in,” Bateson said. “It can grow by improving the payment. There’s still too much friction, particularly on mobile and understanding local variations around how they want to give and the amount will yield future return.”"
Source:  Digiday, 18th October 2018

The FT has 930,000 paying subscribers

"The Financial Times believes it will complete its “march to a million” journey to 1 million paid subscribers next year after a positive response to a change in its access model.
The FT revealed it now has 930,000 paid subscribers, with 740,000 of those (79.6%) being digital subscribers and the remaining 190,000 having a print-only deal. Digital subscription is up 11% year-on-year and overall subscription by 7%.
The realisation of the longstanding 1 million target would be a significant vindication of a paywall strategy that began with its first digital subscriptions in 2002 and continued in 2007 with the introduction of the FT’s first metered-paywall. Its chief executive, John Ridding, recently recalled how that decision met with a “pretty hostile” response from digital futurists, who warned the paper that “the internet wants to be free”.
In reality, that 16-year quest behind the paywall has been conducted without a definitive map. The FT has tweaked and re-tweaked its navigational dials as evolving technology has given it new insights into reader behaviour and the paths it must travel to find new audiences."
Source:  The Drum, 30th August 2018

1/3 of the largest US newspaper sites are blocking European visitors due to lack of GDPR compliance

"Websites had two years to get ready for the GDPR. But rather than comply, about a third of the 100 largest U.S. newspapers have instead chosen to block European visitors to their sites."

Source:  Nieman Lab, 7th August 2018

Facebook referrals to Slate have fallen by over 85% since January 2017

Source:  Data from Parsely, reported by Slate, 27th June 2018

Fake news spreads more quickly than genuine news

"We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise ~126,000 stories tweeted by ~3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it."
Source:  Abstract of The spread of true and false news online by Soroush Vosoughi1, Deb Roy, Sinan Aral, reported in Science, 9th March 2018

Publishers are losing millions of dollars a day due to fraudulent inventory

"A new study has found massive volumes of counterfeit inventory across global display and video exchanges. The study, which was conducted by a partnership of 16 leading programmatic publishers across 26 domains, found that the record levels of fraud were resulting in lost revenues of up to $1.27bn per year.
With the participation of DSPs including Amobee, Quantcast and Google, the publishers examined the total available inventory across all exchanges for the 26 domains, and found video callouts were overstated by as much as 57 times the available inventory, representing around 700m counterfeit callouts per day. For display advertising, inventory was overstated by four times, with daily counterfeit callouts in the billions.
The publishers involved included Business Insider, The LA Times, Mail Online, The New York Times, Turner, USA Today, The Washington Post and Watson Advertising. In an effort to combat such high levels of fraud, the firms have thrown their support behind the IAB’s Ads.txt initiative, which aims to provide a standard way of authorising inventory.
“The results of this study confirm that Ads.txt needs to be adopted as rapidly as possible to cut off the flow of counterfeit website inventory,” said Dennis Buchheim, senior vice president and general manager at IAB Tech Lab. “It is critical that the industry comes together to put a stop to criminal activity and secure the health of the supply chain.”
Counterfeit impressions are created when a bad seller replaces the URL of a low quality site with a premium publisher URL, or a fraudster creates fake impressions and labels them with a high quality publisher’s URK. This fake inventory is then sold on multiple exchanges and SSPs, without the knowledge of the publishers they are impersonating, to trick advertisers into thinking they are buying premium inventory. The process robs premium publishers of revenues, and tricks advertisers into buying mislabelled and potentially unsafe inventory."

Source:  Mobile Marketing, 12th December 2017

The FT has more than 900,000 paying subscribers

"The Financial Times has surpassed 900,000 paid-for readers for the first time.  Celebrating this success in a note to staff, FT CEO John Ridding said:
“Last week, we burst through the 900,000 paid-for reader level.
“That is a major milestone and a fantastic achievement, and I wanted to say a big thank you for getting us to this historic record. Never before in our 130 year history have so many people paid to read the FT.
“It was a company-wide and coordinated push – from our excellent editorial coverage, with a string of strong exclusives and beautifully written features, to smart marketing, customer service and product and tech. It was also the result of many individual efforts, such as sending gift articles to friends and contacts and spreading the message about the FT."

Source:  Financial Times, 20th November 2017

The Guardian has 800,000 paying readers - inc 300,000 'members' & 300,000 donors

"This significant shift in the Guardian’s business model, making it less dependent on a highly challenging advertising market for media companies, results largely from a quadrupling in the number of readers making monthly payments under the title’s membership scheme, which has grown from 75,000 to 300,000 members in the past year.
The paper has also slightly increased – to 200,000 – its subscriber base for its print and digital products. And in a development which has even surprised senior Guardian executives, a further 300,000 individuals have made single donations to the paper, which has been posting appeals at the end of articles, urging readers to financially support its commitment to open access journalism.
These one-off donations, totalling several million pounds, come from 140 countries but a substantial proportion has arrived from the US, suggesting that despite a recent diminution of the Guardian US operation, the paper has a committed audience in a country with established traditions of supporting public interest journalism through philanthropy.
Together, the 800,000 contributors (members, subscribers and donors), along with casual sales of the physical paper, give the Guardian a record number of paying readers; more than the half-a-million pinnacle in print circulation achieved in the late 1980s."

Source:  The Drum, 26th October 2017

BuzzFeed's live morning show AM to DM is getting about 1m viewers each day

"Twitter’s making a big push into live video, with deals for pro sports, talk shows, network TV premieres and more. But what does a real newscast look like if you rethink it for Twitter? BuzzFeed’s AM to DM offers a possible answer — and it’s a fun one.
I should say up front that I’m super-biased here, even by the debased standards of media writing about media. One of the show’s hosts, Saeed Jones, was my roommate a few years ago, while the other, Isaac Fitzgerald, is a close friend. (He was the one who suggested that Jones and I should live together.)
Still, I was far from the only one watching after the show premiered last week. AM to DM was trending on Twitter, reaching No. 1 in the U.S. and No. 4 globally. In fact, BuzzFeed says the show averaged about 1 million unique viewers each day, with clips being viewed a total of 10 million times. And it’s a young audience, with 78 percent of daily live viewers under 35."

Source:  TechCrunch, 4th October 2017

Note - Not exactly sure of what counts as a viewer - would someone scrolling past a re-tweet count?
See AM2DM here

3 brands cominate UK news sites - The BBC, The Guardian and Mail Online

"Three brands (BBC, Guardian and Mail Online) together accounted for two thirds of stories read (63 per cent) and time spent (64 per cent) amongst our total sample of UK news sites during the month.
The BBC News website became even more important during the Westminster attacks as a source of reliable news. Three-quarters (76 per cent) of all those who accessed any news story about the attacks used the BBC site and over half (55 per cent) only used the BBC. Aggressive use of social and search allows some smaller brands to perform better around individual stories than they do on average, as illustrated by the Independent’s strong performance around the UnitedAirlines passenger eviction story.
Different formats are effective for different types of stories. Live blogs were by far the most popular online format during the first 12 hours of the Westminster attacks, but a 53-second video was the key driver of the United Airlines coverage.
Some brands are much more reliant on side-door traffic than others. Only 22 per cent of visits to BBC news stories come from social media, search, and other links, with 78 per cent coming from a direct path. This contrasts with other outlets like the Sun and the Independent, which generate the majority of their traffic via third-party referrals (e.g. search engines and social media). Many brands in the UK are struggling with low engagement (time spent) and low levels of loyalty (frequency of use), which is likely to make it hard to charge for content.
In general, those using social media consume more news brands than those who tend to go directly to a news website or those who tend to search for news. Those who use social media more heavily access an even wider range of brands.
Overall, our analysis shows a winner-take-all environment dominated by a few major brands, but also that distributed forms of discovery, such as social media and search, generally point towards more diverse news use than direct discovery."

Source:  Data from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, reported by Advanced TV, 30th August 2017

Visitors spend approx 35% more time with pages that use Google AMP

"Chartbeat says visitors to web pages that load with Google AMP are spending 35 percent more time with that content on average than with standard mobile web pages.
On average, visitors spend 48.2 seconds with pages found through Google search that load with AMP, compared to 35.6 seconds on average with standard mobile pages found through search.
That means pages that load with accelerated mobile pages software (that’s what AMP stands for) are more valuable to advertisers, because visitors that spend more time with content spend more time scrolling through ads."

Source:  Recode, 5th June 2017

17% of Daily Mail readers who voted in the June 2017 General Election voted for Labour

Source:  YouGov, 13th June 2017

60% of the Guardian's Google mobile traffic is from AMP

"Many publishers have scrambled to adopt AMP, Google’s answer to Facebook Instant Articles. As the Guardian’s experience showed, Accelerated Mobile Pages can be a success if publishers put the work in.
AMP has gradually been taking over the Guardian’s mobile traffic; today, 60 percent of its Google mobile traffic is AMP, well above the 10 to 15 percent that publishers have been getting from AMP, according to a recent estimate by SEO consulting company Define Media.
AMP pages are 2 percent more likely to be clicked on and clickthrough rates on AMP pages to non-AMP pages is 8.6 percent higher than they are on regular mobile pages, according to Natalia Baltazar, a developer for the British newspaper, who presented at AMP Conf, a two-day conference hosted by Google taking place in New York City March 7-8."

Source:  Digiday, 8th March 2017

The Guardian has more than 200,000 paying members

"I’m delighted to let you know that today we have reached an important milestone in our efforts to rebalance the Guardian’s business model to offset the dramatic decline in advertising: the Guardian now has the financial support of more than 200,000 members. In addition, we have 185,000 subscribers and people are buying the paper on newsstands more regularly than we expected. After responding to lots of feedback from readers suggesting they would be happy to give money to support the Guardian’s journalism, we have also now received more than 160,000 one-off contributions from around the world.
We greatly appreciate the role you all play in the Guardian. Thank you. Whether by joining as a member, taking out a print or digital subscription, buying the paper or giving a one-off contribution, you are providing crucial financial support for our independent journalism, and showing how much you value the Guardian’s fair and factual reporting, informed by our progressive and liberal values. This feels more important now than ever."

Source:  Letter from editor Kath Viner, 13th March 2017

Note - Membership was introduced in September 2014

Premium publishers made approximately 14% of their ad revenues from distribution platforms like Facebook in 2016

"Publishers are receiving far less money than might have been expected from placing their content on the third-party distribution platforms owned by companies including Facebook, Google, and Snapchat, according to a new report.
The report, from premium publisher trade body Digital Content Next (DCN), claims that the (mean) average premium publisher generated $7.7 million in revenue from distributing their content on third-party platforms in the first half of 2016 — equivalent to around 14% of their overall revenues in the period."

Source:  Business Insider, 24th January 2017