As the phone hacking story rumbles on and more of the Murdoch empire gets dragged into the scandal, the big question remains: how will this ultimately effect visits to key players in the print industry online, and where are the News of the World readership going online now that their paper has been scrapped?
The venerable Robin Goad predicted that the Daily Mail and The Mirror would be the titles that would benefit the most in the short term from an increase in traffic until News Corp could deliver a “Sun on Sunday” paper. Looking at the combined properties of the top print media websites (i.e. Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday for ‘All Mail properties’) the surprising result is that most of media players saw a decline in visits between Sunday 10 July and Sunday 17 July.

Of the assembled categories in the chart above, only The Mirror properties (up by 5.65%) and The Telegraph properties (up by 0.84%) saw an increase in visits on 17 July compared to 10 July when the final News of the World paper went to print.
Focusing on the individual titles, the biggest increase in visits week-on-week this Sunday was for the Mail on Sunday, which witnessed three times more traffic on 17 July than on 10 July. The People saw a 65% increase in traffic week-on-week, and the Sunday Mirror increased visits by 44%.
Interestingly, despite the well publicised closing of the News of the World, people were still visiting the website last week (perhaps out of habit) making the NOTW website the 48th most visited News and Media Print website in the UK on 17 July. The downstream traffic for websites visited after the NOTW place holder (below) shows that The Sun was the paper to benefit from the most traffic directly after a visit to the NOTW.

As the clickstream chart below shows, 12.80% of visits leaving the NOTW website went directly to The Sun, compared to 6.40% going to the Daily Mail and nearly 3% to the Mirror. On the day of 17 July though when there was no new content from The Sun, downstream traffic from the NOTW to the Daily Mail doubled.

As Robin predicted last week, the data suggests that the most obvious overlap in audience for ex-NOTW readers is to go to The Sun and indeed the clickstream data shows that UK Internet users are visiting The Sun when they cannot find news on the NOTW website. However, until The Sun can provide a Sunday supplement both online and offline, it is the Mirror and Mail properties that are reaping the benefits of a NOTW-less media.
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