I pointed out that the nine UK national newspaper sites get 1 US visitor for every 3 UK ones. Here’s a breakdown of what drives that traffic, again using Compete.com data.
- Overall, Google drives the most US traffic – 19.1% of the total traffic to the 9 UK national newspaper sites.
- News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic, accounting for 12.7% of the total.
- Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6% (see methodology at the end).
Here are the US traffic numbers for each site, with the top 5 referring sites. Update: The Times says is doesn’t recognise the OptMD figure and has given me its internal data, which is below.
FT: 5,960,589 unique USA visitors in June
- drudgereport.com 15.53%
- yahoo.com 11.05%
- google.com 8.37%
- wsj.com 2.29%
- bloomberg.com 2.23%
Daily Mail: 5,199,078
- google.com 22.44%
- drudgereport.com 15.94%
- yahoo.com 4.70%
- facebook.com 3.14%
- digg.com 1.95%
Daily Telegraph: 4,087,769
- google.com 19.00%
- digg.com 11.48%
- drudgereport.com 9.13%
- yahoo.com 3.42%
- facebook.com 1.88%
Guardian: 3,676,498
- google.com 25.11%
- drudgereport.com 5.73%
- yahoo.com 3.23%
- facebook.com 3.13%
- sofacinema.co.uk 1.74%
I’m not quite sure why sofacinema is sending so many americans to the guardian (the guardian owns it – but it’s a UK service I thought)
Times: 2,805,815
- google.com 21.02%
- drudgereport.com 13.59%
- optmd.com 3.08%
- yahoo.com 2.94%
- evri.com 2.26%
OPTMD is a pop-under advertising seller – so the Times is paying for its 3rd most popular source of traffic.
The Times says it doesn’t recognise the OptMD number and sent me this tweet: “Internal figs for Times Online, last 30 days, US visits only: Google.com 26% Drudge 16% Foxnews 3% Digg 3% Yahoo 2%”
Evri.com is a search engine with a widget – the Times has it on its site.
The Sun: 2,419,319
- drudgereport.com 19.48%
- google.com 19.11%
- adsnewsint.com 5.71%
- yahoo.com 2.95%
- facebook.com 2.17%
Adsnewsint.com looks like a News International ad network – again, the Sun appears to be buying traffic off other NI companies.
Independent: 1,317,298
- google.com 22.80%
- drudgereport.com 11.66%
- websitehome.co.uk 2.80%
- yahoo.com 2.66%
- reddit.com 1.88%
Again, a little odd that a UK site building site is sending so much US traffic …
The Mirror: 748,098
- google.com 36.36%
- accelerator-media.com 5.21%
- yahoo.com 3.65%
- google.co.uk 3.18%
- bbc.co.uk 2.58%
Express: 63,216
- google.com 11.23%
- accelerator-media.com 10.34%
- bbc.co.uk 6.09%
- sublimemedia.net 5.53%
- dailyexpress.co.uk 3.70%
Even with two advertising networks in there, the Express still doesn’t get much traffic.
Methodology
The aggregated %s at the top (ie amount of traffic from Google, Facebook etc) will understate any sites that don’t appear in the top 5 for some papers.
This mainly applies to Facebook, which isn’t a top-5 referrer for the FT. However, this will only add a couple of % at best to its overall figure (IF facebook were at #6 for FT, it could account for, at most, 2.22% to the FT’s traffic, which in turn is about a fifth of the total, so the Facebook figure might be understated by 0.5%.)
Drudgereport, Yahoo and Google are in the top 5 for the main papers, so the aggregate figures for these sites are accurate.
While the Compete data includes referring sites and search, it doesn’t seem to include direct traffic, so bookmarks etc are presumably not counted in its totals.
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