OPEN

Heather Hopkins has published her second illuminating post on competition between newspaper brands and other traditional media online with new ways of getting news.

She takes a close look of the biggest story at the start of this year online – the execution of Saddam Hussein. According  to her analysis of where people went when they searched for “saddam hussein” or “saddam hussein execution” video sites like YouTube and Google Video, Wikipedia and Google News were the most visited sites.

We see BBC and CNN high in the rankings too, but the most useful sites here are the ones that give people access immediately to a selection of video reports, the raw footage of the execution which they were unable to see in mainstream media (gruesome but true), objective overviews of the subject (Wikipedia) or a menu of reportage and comment (aggregators) to select from and compare.

Of course two big caveats to reading meaning into this data are that search engine traffic represents approximately 30% of web visits for news on a given day – many people will go straight to trusted news providers – and that the fact that the video footage of the execution may have driven more people to turn to their search engines than for any other story.

Heather also makes an interesting observation:

This example also illustrates that relatively unknown players can rapidly rise around particular events. For example, Xinhua News Agency, a Chinese news website, saw its market share of UK internet visits rise 4.5 times on 30th December 2006 compared with the previous day. The website’s rank increased from 609 in the News and Media industry on 29th December to 175 on 30th December.

I would strongly suspect that this was because of a high showing in the Google News results for the story (although I’d welcome any alternative views or insights on this). This shows the importance for publishers of optimising for search engines (better to think of optimising for the people searching, but you know what I mean). Doing it right can bring new readers.

Interestingly the second news case study Heather takes a look at is the Lebanon-Israeli conflict of last summer. In this analysis Wikipedia emerges as the clear leader for people searching around this story. That makes absolute sense in a political situation as complex as the Middle East many people will be looking for as clear and objective overview / background briefing, which is what Wikipedia offers (whatever the nuts at Conservapedia say).