Mobile news consumption is picking up very fast

The changes are a revolution: Almost one in three visits to Norwegian media products are now from mobile platforms.

For two years I have been recording how users choose the different digital platforms of Norway’s biggest newspaper: Aftenposten.

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The dramatic changes over the last 24 months are indeed a revolution.

People are moving from PCs to mobile platforms at increasing speed. It is only a matter of time before smartphones and tablets will outperform the PC as the major platform for media consumption in Norway.

With 1,3 million unique visitors to its web site every week in a country of 4,5 million there is no reason to believe that the numbers from Aftenposten are not representative for the media market in Norway as a whole.

So let us compare which platforms people used to consume the news from Aftenposten in January 2012 with the same month two years ago.

PC versus mobile platforms

Some conclusions

• Visits from mobile platforms have increased from 3,7 % of the total in January 2010 to 30,5 % in January 2012 (23,9 % mobile phones, 6,6 % iPad).
• Two years ago there were 26 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones.  Last month there were only 2,3 times as many visits from PCs as from mobile phones and tablets.
• So far there are no signs that the new traffic from mobile phones and tablets have cannibalized the traffic from PCs.  Instead the mobile visits are coming on top of the visits already from PCs.
• iPad is picking up quickly – and made a jump during the Christmas holiday. Almost seven per cent of the total visits to Aftenposten’s products now come from the iPad.

Android picking up market shares quickly

There are also interesting developments in what type of mobile phones people use to access the news site:

• Apple’s IOS has stayed the biggest mobile operating system ever since this statistics started two years ago. But in January 2010 IOS was barely bigger than Nokia’s Symbian operating system.
• Since then Symbian have almost disappeared completely and instead Android phones are starting to pick up market shares at increasing speed.
• Last month IOS was 53,6 % of the mobile visits, while 34,5 % used Android phones. The gap between the two is decreasing every month.
• Especially the Android-based  Samsung Galaxy gt-i9100 seems to gain popularity quickly in the Norwegian market. From December 2011 to January 2012 the number of visits from iPhones actually decreased by 3,7 per cent, while the number of visits from Samsung Galaxy phones increased with 15,1 %.  No wonder which phone was under the Christmas trees!

Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten published nude pictures of the national hero Fridtjof Nansen. That was too much for Facebook – and references to the photos were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Facsimile of Aftenposten October 15th, 2011

No nudity, please!, asks Facebook. And photos from 1929 of the Norwegian national hero Fridtjof Nansen were removed from Aftenposten’s Facebook page, which has almost 70.000 fans. In addition the newspaper received a warning that its Facebook page might be removed if new violations of Facebook’s policy were discovered.

Disclaimer: I work for Media Norge, which is the company owning Aftenposten.

The clash between Facebook and Aftenposten raises some interesting principal questions, especially to what extent it is fair that Facebook restricts what a media company (or any other company or person for that matter) publishes on its Facebook page.

Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930) was a Norwegian national hero, well known both for his Arctic expeditions as well as his work to help refugees after the first world war.

Aftenposten tells the story of how Nansen at the age of 67 fell in love with the 30 year younger journalist Brenda Ueland, an American feminist and journalist.

In a new book letters Nansen wrote to Ueland are published, including nude photos Nansen took of himself and sent to his love hoping that whe would returns photos of herself without clothes.

Aftenposten published two of the photos in its article about the book – and also shared the link to the article to the 70.000 friends on its Facebook page. The article received a number of reactions from readers.

The link to the controversial article was shared on Aftenposten's Facebook page

And then Facebook stepped in.

Within a few hours the link had been removed by Facebook from Aftenposten’s Facebook page.

Aftenposten also received a message warning that this photo was violating Facebook’s regulations, and that Aftenposten would risk being thrown out of Facebook if more violations were discovered.

“This message is a warning. Further violations may lead to your account being closed. Please read carefully through the declaration of duties and rights, and refrain from publishing offensive content in the future”, Facebook wrote.

Aftenposten’s editor-in-chief, Hilde Haugsgjerd, argues that Nansen is one of Norway’s biggest national heroes, and that it is known that he had relationships to many women. “Now there is a book on the market with this as the main topic, and we found it in order to cover this editorially”, she says to her own news site.

The photos in question are all from 1929.

So what do you think? Is it OK that Facebook censors this type of content? Or should the social network give media organizations some flexibility to decide for themselves what is proper content to be published under its bran?

I would love to hear your thoughts on this!

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Can the story of traffic accidents be told in a new way?  Journalists and programmers in the Norwegian media house Bergens Tidende joined forces to push local journalism to a new level.

Watch multimedia journalists Lasse Lambrechts explain how they worked with “Killing Roads”

Bergens Tidende is the major newspaper in Bergen, Norway’s second largest and most beautiful city. It’s web site has seen remarkable growth during the last year – and now has around 500.000 unique visitors every week. The number is amazing in a city of 260.000 inhabitants.

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The western part of Norway is full of narrow and winding roads, and traffic accidents are common news items. However, the journalists at Bergens Tidende wanted to dig deeper into this issue, and asked themselves not only who got killed, but why. Would there be any data that could help them understand this issue?

The Norwegian Public Roads Administration was approached, and after persistent use of the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act, the journalists got access to a database of all road accidents in the country.

• Killing Roads: Find bt.no’s main page for the editorial project here

The database turned out to be a journalistic goldmine: It contained details about 11.400 traffic accidents all over the country, all neatly arranged in an Excel file. Not only did the database give the exact position of each accident, but it also included numerous details, such as how many were killed and injured, the seriousness of injuries, driving conditions, type of vehicle, type of street, speed limit, time of the day, etc.

Still, most journalists would at this point probably have been happy to take a look at the database, extract some of the relevant accidents and made a couple of news stories based on them. In Bergens Tidende, though, the journalists instead were teamed up with programmers. Within a few weeks all the traffic accidents in the country had been put on a big Google map with endless ways to search the database.

Here is the smaller version of the map:

The data from The Norwegian Public Roads Administration did not give the names of any victims. But good journalism is always about people, and the journalists spent a lot of time over several weeks to identify victims. Relatives were asked for permission to use photos of the victims in the newspaper and on the web site. Many of them were interviewed at length about their experiences.

“Killing Roads” has been one of the biggest editorial projects at Bergens Tidende over the last few years, and resulted in a large number of newspaper articles, numerous stories on the web site as well as many video reports.

This video report (in Norwegian) tells the story of a couple who was killed in one of the traffic accidents.

The online part of this project is innovative and some of the best we have seen. It demonstrates how successful you can be with mixing the experience of programmers and journalists.

Here are some of the stories:

• Interactive graphic of the young traffic victims in the local province
• Interactive and searchable map of all traffic accidents in Norway
• The road strech with most accidents
• Test drive the most dangerous road – and see exactly where the accidents happened
• Readers marked more than 500 dangerous road stretches in Norway
• … and many other stories here

What is the most important things they have learned?

Lasse Lambrechts, a programmer who now works as multimedia journalist, says:

- It is always more work than you imagine. And it is extremely important to have a good structure, which I have learned in my years as programmer.

Lambrechts thinks they are the first team doing something like this in Norwegian journalism, and he believes the project is rather unique also globally.

Lasse Lambrechts is one one of many in a large team that has worked on “Killing Roads” at Bergens Tidende. Other team members include developer Håkon Ferstad, journalist Øivind L. Eidsvik,  video journalist Sonja Ystaas and journalist Erlend Langeland Haugen.

Bergens Tidende has decided to make the map of traffic accidents available to any other news media or blog in Norway that might be interested. All it takes is a couple of code lines – and a localized version of the accident map may be embeddedon any web site, as displayed above.

Personally I was very impressed with their work. I think it is an superb example of how different professions in the media, such as journalists, video journalists and programmers, by working together can a world-class editorial experience.

We need more of this type of journalism if the media companies shall survive in the future!

Bring it on, my fellow colleagues!

Bring it on!

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Disclaimer: I work as editor at Media Norway, which is the company owning Bergens Tidende. However, I have not been involved in this editorial project in any way.

Newspaper-owned Nettby used to be Norway’s largest online social community. Then came Facebook. Gone were the media companies’ hopes of being the centers of gravity for people’s social activities.

This blog is about digital media trends. That includes trying to look into the future, for instance by identifying 8 digital media trends that are shaping 2010.

Yet the digital media landscape is changing so fast that only one thing can  be stated with certainty: The future will be different from what we are able to predict.

At the peak Nettby had more page views alone than the 10 next web sites in Norway together. But then came Facebook ...

This week brought the news that the once hugely popular social community Nettby in Norway will cease to exist in the beginning of next year. Probably very few of our readers internationally have ever heard of Nettby. Still, stay with me as the story is an interesting example of how the digital landscape has changed within just a couple of years. Certainly it illustrates how what we thought about the future just a short time ago completely failed to materialize.

Let us go back around three years – to 2007. At the time a lot of media companies were starting to discover the power of social media. We were thrilled by how media tycoon Rupert Murdoch two years earlier had bought MySpace.com for no less than 580 million USD. By 2007 Myspace was considered the leading social community site in the world.

In many newspaper companies, especially in small markets like Norway, we were dreaming of creating a big local social network of our own. We hoped that we could be a center of gravity for our readers, helping them connect to each other.  To achieve this we were studying MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and other global social communities that were growing.

I worked for Aftenposten at the time, which is now Norway’s largest newspaper. In our digital development department we strongly believed that we could build a leading social community for Norwegian users.

800.000 Norwegians had a profile on Nettby at the peak

The thinking was similar in other media houses in Norway. And it certainly was not without merit.  In Norway the newspaper Dagbladet already had some success with its social community Blink, which was followed by an even more successful community by the tabloid newspaper VG, namely Nettby.no (launched in September 2006).

In the Norwegian web market media houses have maintained a very strong position. Several newspapers are on the top 10 list of popular web sites among Norwegians. The most popular site is VG.no, which last week had 3,7 million unique visitors – in a market of 4,5 million people. With the possible exception of Aftonbladet.se in Sweden, I doubt that you will find any other newspaper company in the world with such a dominant position in its local market.

VG’s social community Nettby had a broad appeal – and tried to be the social meeting point of all Norwegians online. At the most – in 2008 – it saw 400.000 active users per week and more than 300 million page views. Again: Remember the small size of the Norwegian market!

In 2008 the Schibsted Media Group, which owns VG, valued Nettby at around USD 31 million. Others valued it at up to three times as much.

But then came Facebook.

Slowly Nettby, which had become so popular in Norway, started to loose ground. Norwegians discovered Facebook. They concluded Facebook gave them more benefits in terms of functionality and opportunities of connecting with old friends.

Even though Nettby was supported by the biggest traffic-generating web site in Norway, it was not sufficient. People just decided that they were better served by Facebook – despite all efforts by VG to convince them otherwise.

Social communities are often ruled by the principles of network economics. People tend to gravitate towards the biggest service, as all users are better served by being where everybody else is. When Facebook grew in popularity, people would experience that was the site they would indeed meet all their old friends from school. Today 58 % of Norwegians use Facebook on a regular basis.

Young people were the biggest user groups at Nettby in the end. Source: b2b.vg.no

The last bastion of Nettby were the teenagers. Nettby had its strength among the younger users. However, a social network cannot survive without volume. As Nettby had been loosing users steadily for 20 consecutive months, the board decided the lower limit had been reached. Nettby had to cease to exist – and the users needed to be given time to deinstall all their content.

Currently Nettby sees only 60.000 unique visitors per week, a small portion of what it had at the haydays.

Page views per week in 2010 for some of Norway's largest news sites. Nettby is included in the numbers for VG and the main reason for the dramatic drop.

VG’s decision to close down Nettby was certainly not surprising. In fact, those of us who are working for competitors have betted with each other when VG would make the inevitable outcome public.

Still, the demise of this social community illustrates how hard it is for local players to compete with the global giants, like Facebook. Today very few media houses, however strong their position might be, think that they can build a large general social community in their market. The thinking is very different compared to only 2-3 years back.

Instead we are now discussing how we can connect our services to Facebook by using its social plugins. We want our content to be distributed wherever people are and we fight to have the Facebook pages with the most followers. It is important for us that people engage with our content and discuss it. But no longer do we try to have readers do all the discussions on our sites. Rather we tell them: Please tweet about our content! Blog about it! Share it! Like it on Facebook! Engage! Engage! Engage! Wherever you are!

And having noticed how much our thinking has changed, I have asked myself:

What of all our assumptions today will be proven wrong over the next 2-3 years?

I would love to hear your answer to that question!

Media companies can only succeed in charging users for content if they provide unique value. Here are examples of how some sites try to achieve this.

As news media tries to introduce user payment, I have argued that there are essentially five ways to make users pay for digital content .

The five ways are:

• Unique Content
• Unique Convenience
• Unique Usefulnes
• Unique Packaging
• Unique Experience

Any successful attempt to charge users would need to have a very strong offering in at least one of those five areas. The most successful products will combine two or more of the drivers.

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I recently gave a short presentation of this model at a leadership conference in Estonia of Schibsted, the major European media group that I work for. In the presentation I included some examples of how media companies try to use these five drivers in order to charge users for content.

Here is a summary of the examples (mostly Scandinavian) I used in the presentation – with a few extras that I did not have time to include:

Fiskaren – small niche site with paywall

Fiskaren – or The Fisherman – is a small newspaper in Norway targeting commercial fishermen. The newspaper recently decided to put up a paywall on its site – and succeeded. Traffic to the site went down only very little – and they managed to recruit quite a nice number – comparatively speaking – of paying online subscribers.

The reason is obvious: Fiskaren offers Unique Content. There are very few other sites that write for this niche market. Thus the publication enjoys something close to a monopoly.

The Times – will fail in charging for content

The most talked about example when it comes to introducing user payment is The Times in London, which recently introduced a full paywall around the main web site.

This is a risky strategy, and chances are that they will fail.

The main value proposition to readers is that The Times offers Unique Content. But that is also the big questions mark.

As a national news site in a big English-language market: Do people really perceive the content to be so unique that is worth paying for? The verdict is still out: My prediction is that they will fail.

It is worth noting that The Times also try to offer Unique Usefulness to the readers through its Times Plus concept, with commercial offers and discounts on travels, concerts, etc.

The Wall Street Journal – one of very few success stories

The Wall Street Journal is one of the big success stories so far on user payment. 400.000 subscribers pay for their content online, in addition to many more who have access as part of their newspaper subscription.

Does The Wall Street Journal offer Unique Content?

Yes, it does.

Yet, the most important proposition is Unique Usefulness. The brand is extremely strong in providing financial information – and readers are able to convince themselves and their employers that reading The Wall Street Journal actually make them better at doing their job and in making money for their company.  And with the employers picking up the bill, WSJ got itself a good business model.

Kindle – popular for book reading

Kindle has become tremendously popular for book reading, especially in the USA. Also statistics show that Kindle users buy many more books than other customers at Amazon.

Why is that?

Unique Convenience. 650.000 books are available for sale everywhere, even on the beach. You buy with just one click – and the book has been downloaded to your e-reader one minute later. The screen provides excellent reading quality, even in daylight. The device itself is portable and batteries last up to one month. In short it is just a very convenient way of reading books.

The Weight Club – a combination of usefulness and community

VG in Oslo – and Aftonbladet in Stockholm – both run the Weight Club – a service helping members loose weight. Members are given practical tools to record what they eat and how much they exercise.

It has been a big success – and one reason is how the service combines several of the elements in our model. Foremost it provides Unique Usefulness. Members want to loose weight – and they get practical help in doing so.

There is of course also an element of Unique Content, as the journalists provide in-depth articles about health issues, loosing weight, exercising.

More important, though, is the Unique Experience offered by allowing the members to communicate with each other. Members are in a situation in which they desperately need to communicate with others who face the same challenge. I would guess that the forum probably is an important reason why people choose to stay on as member.

The Wired app – using iPad to its maximum

One of the most talked about iPad apps is from Wired magazine. For the first couple of issues it sold almost as many copies as the paper magazine itself.

This app goes much further than most media apps in utilizing the great editorial opportunities and technical capabilities of iPad, such as integrating video, interactive grapchis, cool functionalities, etc. It really is a different experience than reading the paper magazine.

Unique Packaging is the main driver here. Readers are tech-savvy and appreciate all the cool functionalities much more than an average person probably would.

There is of course also Unique Content. And as with other magazines on iPad it also provides Unique Convenience. You don’t have to go to the store anymore to buy a magazine. Your kiosk has moved into your sofa.

Aftonbladet Plus – a rare success story

Aftonbladet in Sweden has had great success with their Plus concept. Aftonbladet Plus is a subscription service giving readers access to premium content. The Plus content is clearly marked on the frontpage of Aftonbladet.se.
Aftonbladet does indeed provide Unique Content to the more than 100.000 Plus members. The site has separate journalists working specially on writing this content – and often reserves some of the best stories for the Plus members.

But the service also has a very strong element of Unique Usefulness to it. Much of the content are different types of guides making life easier for readers, such as travel guides, guides for buying cars, fixing your house, etc.

The TV Guide – charging for free content

Norwegian news site VG har moved very quickly up on Apple’s Top grossing apps list in Norway with its TV guide for iPad.

The content is easily available for free in any newspaper or news site. Why are people paying then?

First of all the app offers Unique Usefulness. Different functionalities, like the possibility to schedule your TV-night, makes it more practical to use than just a regular TV schedule.

But there is also an equally strong element of Unique Convenience. The primary user situation for iPad is in the sofa at night. And where do we watch TV? In the sofa at night, of course. Therefore the app is not only useful, but also very convenient to use. It’s just there in your hands – as you watch TV. VG has hit very well with a useful product designed for a particular user situation.

Aftenposten: E-paper with 150 years’ archive included

Aftenposten’s digital archive contains newspapers from 1860 up to today’s fresh edition. Containing almost 2 million pages there is no other newspaper in Norway with a similar historic archive. Thus this is indeed Unique content.

In fact this content has been free before. But you had to go to a library, ask for the micro film rolls and patiently go through themthem. It took for ever.

Now readers can do the same in their own home. It is Unique Convenience.

Consumer Reports- helping people solve their problems

People need practical help with their problems – and not only academic approaches.

Consumer Reports in the USA has managed to get more than 3 million peopole to subscribe to surveys, consumer tests and product comparisons on its site.

The reason is clear: Consumer Reports offers Unique Usefulness. It helps people make wise decisions in their everyday life.

An important element is that the service also offers Unique Convenience. Hundreds of sites offer product tests and for users it can take a lot of time to search through all of them and select which are the credible ones. Consumer Reports has over a long time succeed in building such a strong and credible brand that users save time by going directly to its site instead of searching all over for advice.

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What do you think of this way of looking at user payment? Do you have other examples that should be included on the list? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Readers are of course moving online. In fact, until recently managers of the big media houses were all able to argue that never before had so many people in total used their media products. It is interesting to note that for both VG and Dagbladet the total reach is now diminishing. For Aftenposten, which is still lagging behind its competitors in the number of online users, the total reach is still increasing.

Change in number of readers for the 10 biggest newspapers. Source: TNS Gallup

What shall we make of this development?

First of all: It is bound to continue and probably also pick up speed. As I have argued before: What can become digital, will become digital.  This transformation is inevitable – and the biggest challenge for the media companies right now is not to stop people running away from the printed papers, but to figure how to build a strong digital offering with a sound business model. Media houses that do not have that focus are going to loose.

Secondly: Norwegian newspapers still have a very strong position in the population and are thus well positioned to manage the digital transformation – if it is managed well, that is. Hardly in any other country the online newspapers are used so much as in Norway. The largest news site, VG Nett, has a daily reach of 37,6 per cent of the population! Beat that! Dagbladet reaches 24,4 per cent online every day, while Aftenposten.no has a daily reach of 14,8 per cent.

Related articles in other blogs

• Is it too early or too late to migrate newspapers and books to e-readers? (Print CEO) (whattheythink.com)
• The Web Eclipses Print Newspapers as a News Source (dailyfinance.com)
• How Income From News Readers Stagnates Despite Growth (paidcontent.org)
• Not a single newspaper in the UK shows an increase in circulation (guardian.co.uk)
• How news sites in Norway engage readers more than in the UK (betatales.com)

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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

The Norwegian sites have more daily pageviews per user

Lower bounce rate for Aftenposten and VG than for the UK sites

Norwegian users spend more time on the news 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.

More traffic from search to UK news sites

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?

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More than 1,6 million people live in Norway’s capital Oslo, claims Facebook. But the real number is only about 500.000. Advertisers be warned: You cannot trust the demographic numbers of Facebook.

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The very core of Facebook’s advertisement model is the promise that you can pick exactly the target group you want for your ad. Do you want to reach only women between 40 and 50 years old? No problem! Facebook will show your ad only to that group. Teenage boys in Sweden? Sure. Facebook can do what no other advertising platform can help you with.

But start comparing Facebook’s estimated reach for different groups with the actual demographics and it may all look quite different.

Espen Grimmert

My former colleague Espen Grimmert did just that. Grimmert, who is one of the smartest people I have ever worked with,  recently resigned from his position as digital marketing director at Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten to start his own company Klokere.no. In his start-up he offers consulting and courses in how companies can use social media in an efficient way.

Among Grimmert’s courses is how companies should use Facebook. One message: Don’t automatically trust the demographics of Facebook!

In an article in the Norwegian business newspaper Dagens Næringsliv Grimmert gives several examples of how Facebook’s demographic figures can go all wrong. He compares Facebook’s numbers with the official numbers of Statistics Norway. (You can read a Norwegian version of Grimmert’s thoughts here)

Here are some of them:

• According to Facebook 1.665.000 Norwegians live in the capital city of Oslo. The real number is only about one third of this.
• Facebook claims Norway’s second largest city Bergen has 72.440 inhabitants above the age of 13. The official number is 216.033.
• Another city is Stavanger. According to Facebook it has 193.200 inhabitants. The official statistics, however, only shows 102.951.
• A smaller city in Norway, Drammen, has 5.460 inhabitants according to Facebook. Official numbers are 52.643.
• According to official statistics there are 613.000 Norwegians between 20 and 29 years old. Facebook, however, has found another 200.000 and claims the total number is 853.480 people.

Espen Grimmert says to BetaTales:

- Advertisers are mislead to believe that they might reach more users than they actually do, and they might pay for an audience they don’t want. Especially regarding age it seems to be a long way from reality to Facebook’s numbers.

But why are the numbers so wrong?

Grimmert claims many users are misleading Facebook. He mentions a teenage boy he knows who on Facebook claims to be 27 years old and married.  The discussion about privacy and Facebook has encouraged many users to alternate their profile info on the social network, he says.

In the paper edition of Dagens Næringsliv Facebook’s spokesman Jan Fredriksson says the social network uses IP adresses in a specific area to estimate the number of users in a geographic area. In that way a web user can be considered as living in Oslo if he gets his internet connection through company headquarters in that city.

I must admit that I found Grimmert’s thoughts very interesting. I would really love to hear your reflections on this. Can we trust the demographic numbers of Facebook? I don’t think so.

But what do you think? Do you have any examples from your geographic area? Let us know!

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?