Norway’s largest newspaper, Aftenposten, just celebrated its 150 year anniversary. Check out this great interactive graphic for a fun way to ask readers to post their opinions and suggest improvements.

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Reader engagement is usually among the most important qualities of successful media companies. Loyal readers not only come back to your products on a daily basis; they also are eager to help you make it even better.

But what is the best way to ask for your readers’ help? One suggestion is to make it fun to participate.

Here is an innovative effort from my own employer Aftenposten: A circle cloud!  Readers are asked to contribute suggestions for how Aftenposten can improve either in print, on the web, on the mobile phones or in other areas. Suggestions are then put up for vote among other readers. Each circle illustrates one of the suggestions – and the size indicates how many have voted for it so far. By clicking on one of the moving circles your can read the proposal – and then decide if you want to give it your vote.

• See the circle cloud live here

The tool has been developed by three of my smartest colleagues:  Anette Mellbye, who is head of editorial development, and multimedia journalists Atle Brunvoll and Eirik Wallem Fossan.

Actually Aftenposten has worked hard to make more active use of social media recently. One good example is Aftenposten’s Facebook page. The number of followers have increased significantly over the last few weeks and now stands at around 13.600.  Today the Facebook page is being used on an daily basis to communicate with readers. And the readers do respond!

Two examples:

• Travel reporter Simmi Kaur will spend this summer writing about her own country as travel destination. But where should she go? The question was asked on the Facebook page – and she received more than 60 suggestions from readers. In addition many readers offered suggestions on Aftenposten’s Facebook page for travel information.
• How to improve Aftenposten? The same questions that is asked in the circle cloud presented in this blog post was also published on the Facebook page. And lots of high quality suggestions are pouring in.

When do people choose to use their new iPad? In their sofa late at night, if we are to believe the first traffic statistics.

iPad has still not been launched in Norway. Yet a large number of people obviously have gotten hold of the device and their use of it has started popping up on the traffic analytics of the bigger web sites.

I took at look at the iPad user pattern for my own employer, Aftenposten, a leading news site in Norway with 1,1 million unique visitors weekly.

• Read also: 5 advices to succeed with a media product on iPad

Although iPad is not yet for sale in Norway, a four-digit number of users in our country visit Aftenposten.no (where else would they go?) daily, according to our analytics software.

And the user pattern for the first couple of months is quite clear: iPad reaches a definite traffic top in the late night – at around 9 and 10 PM.

This puts iPad as a socalled LPD – or a Lean Back Device, to be used for relaxed consumption of media content. Or should we call it a sofa device?

Here is the graph of iPad usage during the day at Aftenposten.no, updated as of June 16th:

Use of iPad during the day

Use of Aftenposten.no among Norwegian iPad users during the day

As you can see, iPad use reaches the top at around 9 to 10 PM. The traffic at this time of the day is almost double the traffic at the other peak, which is during breakfast time. iPad so far certainly seems to be a device people typically use in their sofa before going to bed.

How does this compare to other platforms?

On PCs the main web site has the highest traffic during the working hours of the day, with a peak at lunch time. Increasingly we also see a peak at night time.

For mobile users there is a peak in the very early hours of the morning, literally before people get out of bed, and very late at night. A smaller traffic peak is seen at around 4-5 PM, when people commute home from work.

So here is the user pattern we might see: You wake up early in the morning. Before getting out of bed, you check the latest news on your mobile phone. Then you proceed to breakfast. It is time for the printed newspaper – or, if you have already bought an iPad, the tablet. Getting to work, your will check the latest news on your PC. And in the evening, after dinner and all the kids have been put to bed, you will jump into your sofa and enjoy content on your iPad. To be completely sure you got it all, you will check the latest news on your mobile phone after you have gone to bed and before you finally fall asleep.

For media companies the main question is: How can we produce great content not only for each one of these platforms and user situations, but also in a way that will keep a close relationship with our users throughout the day, no matter which platform they will choose to use?

The winners will be the media companies that can answer this question in a compelling way.

I think.

What is your opinion?

Newspapers own less than 1 per cent of the time spent online in the US. This is in strong contrast to the situation in Scandinavia. In fact, Norway’s largest newspaper site, VG.no,  have more page views than any newspaper site in English, despite the fact that only 4,7 million people live in the country.

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The June numbers from Nielsen and the Newspaper Association of America are indeed very low, at least if you consider that USA does have more than 300 million inhabitants, of which 195 million  are defined as web users by Nielsen.

Here are some of the numbers:

• Only one in three users – 70 million – visited a newspaper site during June. I repeat: One in three!
• Newspaper sites generated 3,5 billion page views and 597 million user sessions
• Nieman Journalism Lab points out that this amounts to 0,69 per cent of the total page views among web users in the USA. 0,56 per cent of total time spent online was spent on newspaper sites.

Now let us compare these numbers to Norway, a country of 4,7 million people (or about 1,5 % of the US population). According to TNS-Gallup there are 3,4 million monthly internet users in Norway above the age of 12. In no other country people have read as many newspapers as in Norway, and the habit of trusting the media companies has been transferred online.

Numbers can not automatically be compared: In Norway web traffic is measured in terms of daily and weekly number of visitors, while Nielsen uses monthly statistics for American sites. It is also difficult to estimate how much of total online time is spent on newspaper sites. Let us still make a try, though.

Here you find the weekly statistics for week 31:

Note that this list only includes the largest Norwegian web sites, and not numbers for international sites like Google, Facebook and YouTube.
Top of the list is vg.no, which is the web site of Norway’s largest newspaper. With 2,9 million weekly visitors, or close to 90 per cent of Norway’s monthly web users, it is no less than a dominant position.

To put it in perspective: VG.no during this week alone had twice as many page views as nytimes.com in the whole month of May, according to numbers from Comscore.

But you also find a number of other newspapers on the Norwegian top web list: Dagbladet.no (1,7 million UV), Aftenposten.no (916.000 UV), Adressa.no (313.000 UV), Bergens Tidende (306.000 UV) and DN.no (275.000 UV), as well as  a number of sites that are primarily offering news content from media companies: NRK.no (1,9 million UV), Nettavisen.no (864.000 UV), ABCnyheter (574.000 UV), E24.no (483.000 UV), Klikk.no (447.000 UV) and DinSide.no (401.000)

Times of India recently claimed to be the top English language newspaper web site in terms of page views, again citing data from Comscore.  Next on the list were the sun.co.uk (142 million), nytimes.com (124 million),dailymail.co.uk (73 million) and washingtonpost.com (61 million).

Multiply page view numbers in the list above by four to get an estimate of monthly traffic and you will see that all top three Norwegian newspapers, – VG, Dagbladet and Aftenposten – would have made it to this top five list from Comscore. That is, if they had been published in English.

Again: Let me remind you that Norway is a country of only 4,7 million people. The dominant position of the newspaper web sites thus is quite impressive.

So why are newspaper web sites so strong in Norway compared to the USA?

I will not go into a deep analysis, but just quickly point out three contributing factors:

• Less competition in small language areas like Norwegian. There will simply be fewer businesses with the power to build strong web sites with lot of original content and users will have less choice.
• Norway has enjoyed the highest newspaper circulation per capita in the world. Even as circulation now is dropping, the media companies are very important in people’s life. This habit has been transferred to the online world.
• Norwegian newspapers have been very offensive in building a strong web presesence early. Editors have deemed it important for the long-term survival of their companies  to take a leading role in presenting content on the web. This involves strong emphasis on interaction with readers. In fact, a significant part of VG.no’s success is the social network Nettby, which is extremely popular among Norwegian teenagers.