England may no longer be an empire in the classic sense, with colonies about the world, but it's still very much an empire in the new virtual world, truly a global media empire to which the rest of the world still turns.
Indeed, for all the power of The New York Times, for example, it's the British newspapers that draw the biggest share of traffic from nations outside its borders, and by huge margins, for some well over half their readership.
That compares to single-digit shares for major U.S. papers, such as The Times and The Washington Post.
"All British papers have high proportions of readers from abroad, particularly from America," says Martin Clarke, associate editor of the Daily Mail and editorial director of its web site. "The media world is evolving into a mass Anglophone market that is independent of geography."
Britain’s Guardian has 4.7 million overseas readers, about 66 percent its online audience, while the Daily Mail has 4.5 million overseas readers, or 78 percent of its visitors. Even the downmarket Sun, famous for its topless Page Three girls, gets 44 percent of its audience from overseas (See chart, below).
Among the U.S. papers, NYTimes.com gets 8 percent of its monthly unique audience from overseas, or about 1.3 million visitors, according to Nielsen//NetRatings numbers for July, while WashingtonPost.com and USAToday.com get about 3 percent from overseas.
The one exception among the U.S. papers is The Wall Street Journal, whose site gets 47 percent of its traffic from outside the U.S. But the Journal is really an international paper, with both European and Far East editions.
Why so much traffic to the sites of UK papers?
No one has any sure answers, but there's some intelligent guesswork going on, and the best reasoning is that British papers offer a far more global perspective, compared to the U.S.-centric editorial content of The Times and The Post, for example. It's essentially the same reason Americans watch BBC news.
"British newspapers are renowned for their independence and the fact that they report more on global news," says Alex Burmaster, European analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings. "It comes down to the perception that U.S. newspapers are far more U.S.-centric in their reporting, that overseas readers will only find out what’s happening in the U.S."
But certainly the search function also plays a role, according to the Mail's Clarke, as do aggregator sites. Neither is a respecter of boundaries when it comes to where they send traffic.
Yet another factor, says Clarke, is that British papers operate in a crowded home market, which forces them to offer compelling content.
"Dare I say it, that in a lot of newspapers in the U.S., where they are monopolies, the content might not be so attractive outside their hometown as ours is," he says. "The fact that you can search the internet so easily means that you can naturally gravitate to the sites with more interesting content. It’s very Darwinian."
For its part, the Guardian believes its popularity stems from its liberal political voice. "We have an international perspective on foreign and domestic affairs that is an interesting voice," says Tom Turcan, general manager, digital for Guardian News & Media. "Our ambition is to become the world’s leading liberal voice." He says the Guardian's overseas readership really began to grow after 9/11 and the start of the Iraq war.
About a third of the site's readers come from the U.S., and the paper will soon launch a new tailored home page for those readers.
The challenge for all the British papers is how to pull revenue from that great flush of overseas readers, says the Mail's Clarke. “In commercial terms, our advertising revenues are driven by the number of UK readers. We haven’t managed to monetize these overseas readers so far.”
Meanwhile, in online ratings for the week ended Sept. 16, Google was the top parent company, followed by Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and News Corp. Online. The top five brands were Google, Yahoo, MSN/Windows Live, AOL Media Network and Microsoft.
NexTag was the No. 1 advertiser for the third straight week with 4.7 million impressions, followed by No. 2 Experian Group Limited at 3.7 million. With 28.9 million ads served, Yahoo was again the top advertising site, well ahead of No. 2 MySpace at 4.7 million.
Sessions per person per week rose from 16 to 17, and domains visited per person also rose, from 40 to 41. PC time per person was up nearly 5 percent from the previous week, to 17 hours and 23 minutes.
