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March Circulation

The Republic of Ireland Circulations for March, for the papers that participate in monthly ABC’s we released. Collectively they are showing 6.5% year on year decline and losing some 13,000 collectively copies since the beginning of 2009 alone. The tabloids are again taking the brunt of the drop in the morning market. The stereotypical view of the ‘redtop’ reader working on site or in an allied trade may actually be true and the redtop paper’s circulation seems to be intrinsically linked to the construction sector. Month on month the tabloids did get a slight lift (as they do historically) from

Multivariate Testing

I listened to a great presentation during Search Marketing World recently given by Russell Sutton of Conversion Works and his thoughts and insights on Multivariate Testing. This allows you to test the effectiveness of different page designs/layouts on traffic retention. If some of your landing pages have high bounce rates then you could well do with looking for clues as to why the rates are so high. As Google point out, visitors will leave a web page within a couple of seconds if they don’t find a compelling reason to go deeper into your site. If that compulsion is lacking

SEO and Hotels/Accommodation

I did some work on the area of Hotels and Accommodation recently. As the JNIR report pointed out so clearly, the accommodation business is really driven by internet search with 51% of Irish respondents saying that they used the internet to look up travel information in the past 6 months. Furthermore some 324,000 Irish people had booked hotels or accommodation in the past six months online. So, for a hotel or any business offering accommodation, internet search is simply too important to take lightly. But I question whether businesses are responding to changing search queries? A great piece of research

Compact Vs Broadsheet

Here’s an interesting one: Delving back to early 2007, this chart shows the number of broadsheet verses compact editions of the Irish Independent Actively Purchased. The actively purchased is used as I wanted to strip out bulks and see if the buying habits of the ‘hand in pockets’ population were swaying towards or away to a particular format. Non bulk sales of the compact are 81,352 (61%) whilst sales of the broadsheet are 51,186 copies per day. Broadsheet numbers are down 10,000 copies whilst the compact is up 4,000 over the two years. So there is a definitive shift towards

JNIR 2009

The latest JNIR arrived showing the web audiences of the participating websites. It shows that, out of the websites surveyed, Yahoo was the highest placed. Universe 3,526 100% Yahoo.ie 635 18 Eircom.net 413 12 RTE.ie 206 6 Irishjobs.ie 154 4 Golden Pages.ie 147 4 Ticketmaster.ie 140 4 Irishtimes.com 132 4 Independent.ie 132 4 Entertainment.ie 102 3 Myhome.ie 99 3 Breakingnews.ie 94 3 Irishexaminer.com 52 1 Pigsback.com 33 1 NightCourses.com 23 1 Hotpress.com 18 1 DayCourses.com 15 0 At least the JNIR (whilst not perfect) does go some way to try and get some demographic data into the area of Irish

Public Relations Firms and SEO

For a business that extols the virtues of publicity, the PR industry as a whole is a little shy in self promotion. I had occasion to research a small fraction of the industry some time back and I found it seriously lacking in the search engine results. I looked at some fairly standard industry public relations keywords to see how individual firms rated against them in results. Now, I would like to state that whilst the industry may seem in the face on it fairly generic it’s actually quite fragmented. Some firms specialise in specific narrowly focused areas and therefore

Google Search Results Related Searches.

Late March, Google announced that it was going to make two variations to its search engine results, the first of which I will deal with here. Herein, at the bottom of the results pages, Google will give you ‘more useful related searches’ to the expression that you have just searched for. They quote that their algorithms “understand” the search term and can therefore throw up some useful, related search expressions. It’s a handy feature and it would be interesting to know more about the relative strengths of the ‘related searches’ to the original search. For example, I searched the term ‘Bebo’

Newspaper Articles and Affiliate advertising

Here’s one that should have been filed under ‘morality or otherwise’. Bizarrely, this all started when I saw a story that grabbed my attention on semoz entitled “How I got a link on CNN“. It was a very enticing headline with shades of espionage and “shaken not stirred”. But alas, it was nothing more than honest to goodness hard work and recognition in a particular field of the Author that got him the article and the link. Anyway, from that article –  one link lead to another and on to a piece, the thrust of this article was about a

Bel Tel going compact!

From tomorrow the Bel Tel is going down the compact road – well continuing down the compact road. They currently have a compact edition for their early morning print run, which then reverts back to a broadsheet for the later editions. The compact then takes over for the Saturday edition in total. Within the early morning edition of 18,333 compact copies, 6,380 are ‘free copy pickup’. The Monday to Friday broadsheet does 51,200 on top of that. The Saturday currently edition does 56,300. (all ABC Jun Dec 2008)

Morning Newspapers Circulations

The rise and rise of the slow decline of Morning Newspaper Circulations! Without the introduction of the Irish Daily Mail, the market would be down just over 68,000 (or 11%) in four years. Taking the Mail into account its down 10,000 copies in the same period reaching the heady heights of 713,000 in July – Dec ’07, the morning market is now back below early 2004 level

Irish Newspaper Readership

The JNRS survey hit the streets and made for some fairly depressing reading in some quarters. Overall readership of newspapers was down only marginally with the morning titles gaining slightly. Notably it’s the first time that the full figures of the Free newspapers came into the survey.  It shows that, after two and a half years, they have a decent readership in the morning and perhaps a slight issue with loyalty to any particular title which is understandable. The ‘fear and loathing’ that was bellowed from some corners about the erosion of the established titles to the new freshet entrants

Sunday Circulations

On the Sunday side the market is also showing a downward trend having lost 69,000 copies in the last four years and or 11% decline in total. January 2004 the market stood at 1.274m copies every Sunday, it’s now to just a shade above 1.20m copies every Sunday.  Over the four years some titles have bucked the overall newspaper tend completely – most notably the Sunday World where circulations have grown by nearly 17,000 copies. On the other end of the scale – the Irish People circulation is down a staggering 92% to 26,847 copies every Sunday. Surely they are

Free Newspapers

After over 3 years locked in mortal combat, it now looks like the Herald AM and its rival Metro will be combining their operations and forming a new free newspaper imaginatively called the Metro Herald. Considering the initial acrimony between the two papers and their respective shareholders, it just shows how an ‘economic downturn’ will focus the mind and reminds me of that nice expression “the pockets thought the hands were mad”. The registered vehicle for Metro is a company called Fortune Green. The Irish Times has a 45% interest in that company, Associated have another 45% and Metro International had

Sunday Circulations

On the Sunday side the market is also showing a downward trend having lost 69,000 copies in the last four years and or 11% decline in total. January 2004 the market stood at 1.274m copies every Sunday, it’s now to just a shade above 1.20m copies every Sunday.  Over the four years some titles have bucked the overall newspaper tend completely – most notably the Sunday World where circulations have grown by nearly 17,000 copies. On the other end of the scale – the Irish People circulation is down a staggering 92% to 26,847 copies every Sunday. Surely they are

Irish Newspaper Circulations 2008

The picture for the newspaper circulations still looks bleak. Some papers really struggled in the past twelve months and some managed to completely buck the trend, with very few titles staying in positive territory. In volume terms the most notable loss comes from the News of the World dropping 17,345 copies every Sunday. This is followed by the Sunday Independent shaving 12,000 off its sale. Bucking the trend was The Sunday World adding 1,400 copies. All the morning titles took a hit, with the ‘tabloids’ taking the brunt of the falls. Their share of the morning market is about 40%

Localised Keyword Spelling – Whiskey

There is no such thing as "Irish Whisky", there is, in fact, only "Irish Whiskey" – to the purist! The Irish and American spelling of the liquid fermented from grain comes with an ‘e’, whereas all the other countries brewing the liquid, like Scotland and Canada, drop the ‘e’. This may seem a little trivial or something that only comes up only in a pub quiz – but it has other knock on effects. Here are the keyword volumes for derivatives of both terms. The volumes are for February:   Approx Search  Volume Worldwide Approx Search  Volume USA Scotch Whiskey

Page Titles

The ever present debate on title tags and what is deemed its acceptable face. The agreed wisdom is that the title tag of a document will only be displayed to roughly 66-68 characters in Google. Other engines have their own set of rules. For example Yahoo will display strictly 120 characters. I blame it squarely on the pixels. Somewhere, someone in each of the search engines has decided that the amount of title displayed in a search result has to be no more than X pixels in length. The number of characters displayed will then depend on the sentence structure

2D Barcodes

I’ve been a fan of QR Codes (2D Bar codes) for some time, looking at them first to see if I could utilise the technology to issue unique WAP links for various products. I could (and may still) and the technology is excellent in that respect, but the real problem was with their adoption, which was, well, lacklustre and fragmented. The technology allows you to capture a 2D code image with a mobile phone camera which is subsequently converted to one of a few (pre) chosen options. The QR code could be pre coded to be a URL for the phone’s browser; it could be text, an SMS or