In an article on British media in the Guardian, Mike Butcher wonders what impact of rising overseas audiences will have on UK newspaper sites. He says that only 27% of the Daily Mail’s readership is British while the telegraph.co.uk had 32.8% of its audience coming from the UK; the Times Online has 35.7%; Sun Online has 34.3% and the guardian.co.uk has 41.8%.
Mike suggests that the industry doesn’t appear to know what to do with all these bloody foreigners (as a Daily Mail reader might put it):
Celebrity and sensation are likely to have been the key to Mail Online’s growth, whether it be stories about Keira Knightley’s “razor sharp” collarbone, Naomi Campbell’s latest run-ins or Lindsay Lohan’s rehab battles… Celebrity and entertainment stories are increasingly international, but although attracting large numbers of overseas readers to catch up on royal or celebrity gossip will dramatically boost your unique users, that traffic is of less use if you can’t sell it to advertisers.
…The 72.8% of Mail Online’s readers that come from outside the UK represent both a challenge and an opportunity - an advertising network with international sales could serve ads to those non-UK readers and therefore monetise the traffic. But, until then, all non-UK visitors are effectively a cost to the site.
Go figure by Mike Butcher: Mail’s rise reopens questions about target audiences
