by Gill Moodie (@GrubstreetSA) A short while back Mail & Guardian editor Nic Dawes told Grubstreet that the paper’s website was doing very well – with its traffic up by about 40% over the past year.
“We’re rolling out new products,” Dawes said in February this year. “We’re spending money on growing a digital business and our online traffic 
was up 40% last year. We sell something like 1500 iPad editions and approaching 3000 Kindle. So we’re growing and things are happening.”
That’s great news from the tough little paper that has gone from strength to strength in recent years. It is, in fact, one of the few in SA to have stable or rising circulation so it’s heartwarming to hear that M&G online is also growing – especially in a market dominated by the giant News24. Grubstreet tracked down M&G online editor Chris Roper to find out more the website’s fortunes.
GRUBSTREET: So Nic said you guys were up 40% last year but what’s he talking about: page impressions, unique users?
CHRIS ROPER: Unique users. There was a 41% change to 1 122 078 unique visitors in February (2013). We had a big spike. We were at about 550 000 in April last year.
The reasons include building a new website. We quite dramatically changed the way the website looked and worked (in June last year) and it included building a new CMS (content-management system).
The new look and feel is the kind that allows us to publish the right kind of content in front of the right people basically. There isn’t a whole bunch of clutter on the page. We kind of paired it down and pushed up things like multimedia. We also focused heavily on social media. So we hired a social-media editor, for example, and we got a spike in referrals from there.
GRUBSTREET: It must help to have an editor who gets online and social media.
ROPER: Oh ja, hugely. That’s a huge advantage for us.
GRUBSTREET: And the website is doing quite a lot of unique content too.
ROPER: Ja, over the last three years we had a switch (in that) we (now) have more unique content than we have feed content. So everybody here writes. One of my funny stats of the last three years is that of the top 20 stories for February, the second highest was done by a project manager.
GRUBSTREET: That’s cool.
ROPER: Ja, it is. Obviously, Oscar Pistorius contributed to the spike – and that’s the same for everybody – …but we’ve actually actively tried to pull it to a million (uniques).
We also paid quite a lot of attention to multimedia and I think probably 10% of our uniques are on multimedia now, which is pretty good.
Also, one of the ways we decided to try to build traffic was to mix up the kind of news we do so we have different demographics that we target at different times. We do a mixture of serious news and a bunch of online stuff about memes. If, for example, our social-media editor sends us the top search terms on the site or top search terms in South Africa or the world or top hashtags in South Africa and the world, we look if there’s any stories we can get out of those.
So when we make editorial choices we’ll say: ‘Look, we’ve got 10 stories today but these two are really trending so let’s maybe pay more attention to that’.
GRUBSTREET: Very clever and so simple!
ROPER: Ja, very easy. It takes our social-media editor maybe three minutes to do, which is cool.
Then we also try to produce content for different kinds of readers that we wouldn’t normally get on the site. So, for example, we have an animated cartoon video every week, which is a kids’ take on the news basically. All these kinds of things – and mixing up the content – helps. So you don’t have one homogenous reader; you have a whole bunch that you interact with.
I think the tablet edition and iPhone and Android apps have also made a bit of a difference to us because we get more referrals – more people tweeting things because they’re accessing us on different platforms at different times.
GRUBSTREET: A lot of referrals must come from mobile.
ROPER: Ja, we also managed to grow our mobile traffic by 4 000% in one month because we eventually got round to giving the people the option to go to a mobisite instead of HTML. But that was just a technical change.
GRUBSTREET: It’s not all about the numbers is it – although it is partly?
ROPER: Well, we tend not to worry about the numbers too much. We’ve got a number in mind that is one that makes it commercially viable but we sell our advertising based on knowledge of our audience rather than the numbers and volume.
We also sell across multiplatforms so, for instance, we have a radio show now on TwoOceans Vibe every Monday for an hour, which is another little touchpoint with the audience.
GRUBSTREET: And is it working, to sell on knowledge of audience? Does it differentiate you guys from News24, for instance?
ROPER: Ja, it does. It only works with a specific subset of clients. It’s the same as the newspaper. You’re not going to be getting Game or Dion Wired advertising in the Mail & Guardian but you do get academic advertising or high-end brands so it does limit the number of potential clients you have. But it also means you can up what you’re charging for the ad spots.
GRUBSTREET: And are online ads sold as part of a wider M&G package?
ROPER: No, we’ve got a separate ad sales team. Both teams are trained to be able to sell converged packages but our guys are specifically online.
Online isn’t a difficult sell but there’s such confusion among publishers and clients about what’s possible and what’s permissible. I don’t think there’s much of a standard yet so it’s a bit of a cowboys’ game out there.
GRUBSTREET: Have you ever thought of going for volume?
ROPER: We could double our traffic by just going for breaking news but it would be the death of the brand.
GRUBSTREET: Ja, if you look at IOL, one wonders if they should reposition themselves because they’ve long lost the volume battle with News24.
ROPER: Obviously, a brand online has a different nuance to that of a newspaper but, at the same time, we can’t mess with it too much. One of the interesting parts of our jobs is to see where we can take the brand into social-media spaces and multimedia without compromising the core: of what the M&G is.
You have to have your meme of the week, you have to buy into the Harlem Shake but, at the same time, get people to understand the seriousness of the brand. It’s quite an interesting juggling act.
– SA’s leading media commentator, Gill Moodie, offers intelligence on media – old and new. Reprinted from her site Grubstreet.