kullin – Page 87 – Media Culpa

Major increase in traffic from Aftonbladet to blogs

Two weeks ago I wrote about how aftonbladet.se noticed a 12% increase in incoming links after the news site started showing blog links to articles. Then I got an email from Roland Karlsson, the person behind the popular Swedish blog networks blogg.se and webblogg.se. Roland told me that the incoming traffic from aftonbladet.se to the blog network quadrupled since the introduction of blog links.

Number of visitors sent to blogg.se and webblogg.se from aftonbladet.se:

week 41: 5,005
week 42: 5,438
week 43: Aftonbladet introduces blog links
week 46: 15,084
week 47: 24,854

Aftonbladet leapfrogged into 10th place of sites that sends most traffic to the blog network, and #6 if you exclude Google, according to Roland Karlsson.

1. google.se 407,526
2. images.google.se 356,596
3. google.com 126,878
4. bloggtoppen.se 50,028
5. englasshowroom.com 38,928
6. lunarstorm.se 37,067
7. images.google.com 31,492
8. playahead.se 31,144
9. bloggkoll.com 26,341
10.aftonbladet.se 24,854

At first sight it might look like a no-brainer that Aftonbladet would send loads of traffic to anything it links to. But a recent example shows the opposite. When 7 bloggers, including myself, participated in blog panel at aftonbladet.se, none of us recieved more than about 20-30 visitors per day from the panel. So the question is whether our topic was too narrow for Aftonbladet’s readers or if it is more beneficial to piggyback on news articles than actually contributing your own original content. I’m leaning towards the former.

Footnote: During week 47 blogg.se/webblogg.se had 58,000 active bloggers.

Tags: aftonbladet, newspapers, statistik, bloggportalen, bloggar, aftonbladet. Ping.

8 out of 10 Swedish dailies lack social bookmarks

[Updated: 74% of Swedish dailies lack social bookmarks. Previous version of this blog post said 79%]

On Monday morning this week I attended a breakfast seminar at SNS where writer Bengt Wahlström presented his new book, a guide to the virtual society. During a panel discussion, Internetworld’s Fredik Wass mentioned that social objects will become more and more important and if you are going to build a site then the content needs to be in a format that can be shared and commented upon.

A very easy way to let readers share your content with others is to add social bookmarks, which is basically just a link that allows a reader to export and add the article to sites like Digg or Facebook.

I ran a check late last week (hopefully this is still accurate) of 66 webpages of Swedish dailies, taken from a list at TU, the Swedish Newspaper Publishers’ Association, with the addition of a few others.

We can see that out of the 66 sites, only 12 (18%) have added a feature where readers can add content to Facebook.

Only 9 sites (13%) show incoming links from blogs, 8 via Twingly, 1 via Bloggportalen. [UPDATED: new graph]

4 sites (6%) let readers add content to Swedish bookmarking site Pusha.

3 sites (5%) have a Digg social bookmarking link.

3 (5%) have a del.icio.us social bookmarking link.

1 site (2%) has a Stumbleupon social bookmarking link.

1 site (2%) has a Ma.gnolia social bookmarking link.

Out of the 66 sites, 49 (74%) did not have any of the above mentioned features. [UPDATED]

The only site in my little survey that had all the features above was Svenska Dagbladet’s site Svd.se and is therefore dubbed the most social bookmarking friendly site by a Swedish daily. Svd.se was also awarded Sweden’s best media site by Internetworld this week.

Footnote: Background data here. Please feel free to build on this data if you wish. In retrospect, I should probably have excluded www.ingress.se which is the joint site for Sala Allehanda, Fagersta-Posten, Bärgslagsbladet/Arboga Tidning and Avesta Tidning since the site does not have any other news than the front page as an image file.

Tags: social media, digg, social bookmarks, sociala medier, pusha, svd. Ping.

Skånska Dagbladet’s new site, not exactly web 4.0

Medievärlden writes that the Swedish daily Skånska Dagbladet just launched a new site, produced by Acne Creative and Acne Digital. Although the new site has a nice and pleasant feel to it, I have to wonder why a newspaper puts so much work into a new site without implementing almost any web 2.0-esque features. I mean come on, it’s almost 2008.

Forgive me for focusing on the negative sides here, but a few quick comments could be made:

– Readers can’t comment on articles
– The site has several blogs (positive) but you can’t comment on the blog posts
– The site does not show links to blogs that comment (via for example Twingly)
– RSS feeds not available for main content or for blogs
– No social bookmarking features (like “add to del.icio.us”)

And I wouldn’t be surprised if SEO pros have more suggestions for improvement (on URL’s for example).

Instead the site has a brand new sports feature with live scores in 26 languages, including mandarin (!). The irony of it all is that the interactive agency, Acne Digital, which is behind the new site, has “web 4.0” in the heading of their own site.

Tags: web2.0, tidningar, media, seo, acne. Ping.

Aftonbladet sees 12% increase in blog links after linking to bloggers

The Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet started to show blog links via its own blog portal Bloggportalen.se on October 23, 2007. I noted on that day, that we should “prepare to see a major increase in blog links to Aftonbladet.se the coming weeks”. The reason being of course that bloggers would be more encouraged to link to a high trafficked site that could possibly send them large amounts of new visitors. So was I right?

Well, on the launch day (at 11.45 PM to be precise), Technorati had registered 61,853 blog reactions to Aftonbladet.se. Today, a little more than a month later, there are 69,219 blog reactions (at 9.38 PM), which is an increase with 12%, in just one month. And I may be wrong here, but I believe that Technorati track links during the last six months which means that links that are older than six months do not count any longer (please correct me if I got this backwards). If that is the case, the increase cannot simply be due to a stretched measurement period, but something else is at play. I would not be surprised if the blog linking stategy has paid off already.

If I had had half a brain, I would also have scribbled down the number of incoming blog links to Expressen on Oct 23, so that we could compare, but unfortunately I didn’t.

Tags: aftonbladet, technorati, bloggportalen, bloggar, aftonbladet. Ping.