Online Journalism News

MEN becomes first UK regional paper to report joint web traffic and print circulation

Against a backdrop of falling print sales The Manchester Evening News (MEN) today became the first regional newspaper to publish joint web traffic and print edition circulation figures.

The MEN made public an Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) group product report detailing both its web readership and printed newspaper distribution.

The paper follows several national titles that earlier this month also reported joint print circulation and web traffic figures for the first time, as part of their monthly readership updates.

The report showed that on average 73,000 users access MEN websites each day. It also detailed how the Evening News' paid-for print circulation registered the biggest fall in regional newspaper sales - falling 13.5 per cent year-on-year.

Today's report covered the six-month from July to December 2007, for the print edition of the paper. However, the MEN chose to report web traffic for November only.

The web traffic across its online network - Manchesteronline.co.uk and manchestereveningnews.co.uk - averaged 73,304 daily unique users in November. A total of 1,534,981 users for the month.

Those users looked at an average of 305,027 pages-per-day, a total number of page views for the month of 9,150,815.

The ABC metric is one of several ways for newspapers to judge internet audience. Hitwise, ComScore and Nielsen/NetRating also provide services to judge readership and popularity online. However, ABC is the preferred method of several publishers as it also publishes print edition figures.

The MEN will now continue to publish joint information from the ABC about the readership of its website and newspaper as part of its half-yearly reporting.

In addition to web data today's report also showed that an average of 81,326 paid-for print editions of the newspaper were sold daily, a drop from over 120,000 from the same period in 2005.

An average of 98,455 copies of the newspaper are now distributed of free each day - after a move last year to a mixed free and paid-for distribution model - making the paper the most widely distributed regional newspaper in the UK with nearly 180,000 copies on the streets each day.

It's ten free weekly newspapers jointly averaged a distribution of 737, 715 during the period, with its nine paid-for weeklies averaging a joint circulation of 112, 567.

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abc | manchester evening news | circulation | traffic |

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