Best Swedish media blog

The blog award YABA – Yet Another Blog Award – was announced today during the Daytona Sessions in Stockholm. As you may know, this blog was nominated in the category Best Media Blog and the competition was really tough with several great blogs on the list. The winner of the category was Same Same But Different and a big congratulations to Sofia and Niclas. I’m very proud to be in third place and I think it’s quite fantastic that my blog, which is the only one written in English, managed to rank so high. The voting process was entirely in Swedish and the percentage of visitors to this blog that are non-Swedish is as high as 70%.

The entire list, Best Swedish Media Blog:

1. Same Same But Different – 165 votes
2. Mindpark – 149 votes
3. Media Culpa – 110 votes
4. Bisonblog – 109 votes
5. Vassa Eggen – 96 votes
6. Twingly – 54 votes
7. Martin Jönsson – 52 votes
8. Newsdesk PR 2.0 – 49 votes
9. What’s Next in New Media – 41 votes
10. Digmar – 19 votes

Best trend/web blog: Johan Ronnestam.

Best marketing blog: Please Copy Me.

Thanks to all readers who voted for Media Culpa.

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Top European media and marketing blogs

Nick Burcher of ZED Media has taken a closer look at the AdAge Power 150 ranking of the world’s top media and marketing blogs and listed the top 113 European blogs. Congratulations to Åsk ‘Dabitch’ Wäppling for grabbing the second place with her advertising blog Adland. Blogs about advertising are the most popular and it was also interesting to note that the top five spots were claimed by non-UK blogs.

My blog is in a flattering 15th place. Full list here.

Top 15 European media and marketing blogs for 19th July 2008 (Power 150 global ranking):

1 (21) Adverblog – ITALY
2 (22) Adland – SWEDEN
3 (23) I believe in adv – ITALY
4 (33) Niche Marketing – POLAND
5 (35) Adverbox – ITALY
6 (45) Russell Davies – ENGLAND
7 (49) David Airey – SCOTLAND
8 (50) Osocio – HOLLAND
9 (51) Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog – BELGIUM
10 (53) Blogstorm – ENGLAND
11 (60) Neville Hobson – ENGLAND
12 (62) Joost De Valk’s SEO Blog – HOLLAND
13 (82) Adliterate – ENGLAND
14 (91) Only Dead Fish – ENGLAND
15 (104) Media Culpa – SWEDEN

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Täby Danderyd Tidning turns free

tabydanderydtidning Täby Danderyd Tidning (T&D;) is a subscribed weekly local paper for the two cities Täby and Danderyd north of Stockholm. It was launched in October 2006 and intented to become the leading local paper in the region within five years. The competition has been tough with three free dailies currently being distributed in the Stockholm region and one (Mitt i Täby) locally. Dagens Media now reports that T&D; only managed to get 2,000 paid subscribers and that the paper scrapped the old business model. Since last week the paper is distributed free to households in the region and it estimates to get a 60-70% reach in the area. The circulation will be 43,000 copies.

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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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Magazines and papers are opening their vaults

Online newspaper advertising in the U.S. rose by 18.8 percent in 2007 to $3.2 billion, according to the Newspaper Association of America [via Mindpark]. And although advertising on newspaper web sites have seen double digit growth for thirteen consecutive quarters, the increase in Q4 was the lowest in the last eight quarters, “only” 13.6 percent.

However, we should not be surprised if this is a temporary dent in the curve. Many news organisations have begun to exploit a resource that has remained largely untouched up til now, namely their archives. About a week ago, Sports Illustrated introduced the Vault, a free part of SI.com that contains all the articles that Sports Illustrated has ever published, many of the images, and some video material. The Vault is expected to account for 5 percent of SI’s online revenue in its first year and then continue to grow.

Other sites have done the same and the experience from for example the New York Times is that the archives drive a significant amount of traffic, with increased ad revenue as a result. When NYT removed its pay wall last September, visits to the archive grew quickly.

– Since then, search traffic to archive pages has more than doubled, and the archives now represent 10 percent of the page views on NYTimes.com, said Diane McNulty, a spokeswoman.

In other words, as more newspaper sites follow the same route, advertising revenue will continue to increase. And with those numbers in mind, it will be interesting to follow how sites like Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet will manage to keep content behind a pay wall. Aftonbladet.se has indeed seen an increase in the number of unique visitors during the last 12 months by about 12 percent, according to KIA Index, so they’re not doing so bad after all.

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Media execs: 40% of content user generated in 3 years

During the IFRA Expo, the content management company Polopoly asked 3,000 European executives in media about their thoughts on user generated content. The respondents said that they believe that 40 per cent of their content could be user generated within three years (in Swedish here). Earlier this year an Accenture study said that “media and entertainment executives see the growing ability and eagerness of individuals to create their own content as one of the biggest threats to their business”.

Disclosure: I used to work at Accenture.

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