Higher quality comments as readers dump anonymity

Kalle Jungkvist Aftonbladet

During StockholmMediaWeek this afternoon, Mattias Fyrenius from TV4 New Media and Kalle Jungkvist, Aftonbladet New Media, talked about their respective sites which are among the most visited sites in Sweden. Ljungkvist said that the typical visitor to Aftonbladet.se is well educated and visits the site several times a day. The first visit is often in the morning and readers scan most of the content of the front page in order to find stories to read. Subsequent visits are more to check if there have been any updates. Visitors are driven by two different motivations – entertainment or “value”. Entertainment includes stuff like web tv, blogs, the content that is of a more “social” nature. The value driven users are more into niche content like the travel site, the site for parental issues and so forth. Women are more frequent users of the value content than men and there is a tendency to access it more often in the evening. The site has its prime time at 8 PM.

It was also interesting to hear from MSM what many of us have been saying for quite a while, namely that journalists are no longer megaphones. Ljungkvist said that the dialogue with readers is vital and that an effect of the new channels is that readers are no longer as anonymous in their comments as they used to be, which in turn equals higher quality because people tend to be more civil when they are identifiable.

More in Swedish on the event blog.

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