Brand Republic


Northcliffe shows advertisers print and online crossover

by Jacquie Bowser Brand Republic 22-Apr-08


LONDON - Northcliffe Media, the regional news division of Daily Mail & General Trust, has been attracting a monthly audience of about 4.7m adults across all of its newspapers and websites, including the Nottingham Evening Post.


This audience figure was tracked using new measurement metrics that calculate the total de-duplicated audience reach across print and online. It is reportedly the first time that such data has been available to advertisers.


The research was carried out across 30 of Northcliffe's 56 local websites, which includes sites such as the Leicestermercury.co.uk and ThisisNottingham.co.uk


Northcliffe also discovered, in the Survey Interactive research, that its network of local websites reached an additional 27% "solus online" users that do not read its local papers.


The media company plans to capitalise on the growth in its online audience by launching more local websites under the This Is brand from next month.


The new sites will feature design changes, including increased levels of multimedia content, aimed at maximising interaction with readers.


Mike Rowley, director of digital for Northcliffe Media, said: "We've always been able to show advertisers our standalone newspaper readership, but now we can also show them how many people cross over between our papers and our websites, as well as those people that just use our websites.


"These results are very exciting and reinforce the strategy that we put in place a few years ago to aggressively drive our digital This Is brands and develop new local audiences for advertisers.


"Through a combination of heavyweight local brand advertising, paid search, search engine optimisation and email marketing we've driven more and more people to our network of websites where they find local news, sport, jobs and property content of equal quality to that traditionally associated with our newspaper brands."


Survey Interactive's research forms part of an ongoing Portfolio Audience project launched last year by the Newspaper Society.