How news sites in Norway engage readers more than in the UK

The leading Norwegian news sites seem to engage readers much more than the British news sites. Why is that?

I was spending some time playing around with Alexa.com the other day and started comparing the traffic pattern of leading news sites in Norway with similar sites in the UK.  There was an interesting pattern: The Norwegian news sites consistently seemed to engage readers more, both in terms of pageviews per visit, time spent on the sites and bounce rate.

Alexa is a leading service in measuring and analyzing web traffic and normally is quite a reliable indicator of which sites people in different countries visit.

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Here are the sites I compared:

Norway:  VG.no is Norway’s largest news site with about 1,2 mill unique visitors daily. That is huge traffic if you consider that the total population of the country is about 4,8 million.  Aftenposten.no is the news site of Norway’s largest newspaper – and has about 320.000 unique visitors daily. (Source: TNS-Gallup)

United Kingdom:  Dailymail.co.uk sees around 2,3 million visitors daily and is the largest newspaper owned news site in the UK. Guardian.co.uk sees around 1,8 million daily visitors, while Telegraph.co.uk sees 1,6 million.  (Source: ABC)

As you will see from the graphs below, some clear conclusions can be drawn:

• The two Norwegians sites have more daily pageviews per user compared to the three UK news sites
• The Norwegian sites experience significantly lower bounce rate
• Also readers on average spend more time on the Norwegian sites than the UK sites

Why do we see this difference?

I have not analyzed the data thoroughly and Alexa data should always be interpreted more as indications than fully reliable data. Yet my guess is that the graphs give a reasonable picture of reality.

There could be several explanations. I believe the most important is that the sites operate in very different markets:

• UK news sites both enjoy a large local market as well as being able to attract millions of readers globally.
• The Norwegian market is comparatively very small and has its own language. This tend to give users fewer, but stronger newspaper brands. However, the language barrier also makes it impossible for the sites to reach significant global reach.

These differences lead to very different traffic patterns. For instance: In the UK only about one in four news sites users have the home page as entry point, according to data from Newspaper Marketing Agency.  For the Norwegian news sites the percentage is around 70 percent.

Instead much more traffic to sites in the UK comes through search than in Scandinavia, as is also indicated in the data from Alexa.

High percentage of the traffic directly to the front page would tend to indicate strong brand recognition and corresponding loyalty, while drop-by readers from Google often will only look at one or two pages before browsing on to other sites.

In addition sites in a small language market naturally will stand out as more unique than sites operating in a global language market. Most people prefer sites in their own language, and when choices are fewer they will probably tend to stay longer on each site.

These are just my guesses. What do you think?

Tagged as: journalism, newspapers, Norway, user involvement