Nielsen has released its annual list of the top ten websites Kiwis visited over the course of December. And while the list was populated by the usual suspects, there were a few surprises in terms of the year-on-year changes for some of the websites.
Fairfax has updated the entire Stuff platform by migrating it to Adobe’s cloud-based content management system called Adobe Experience Manager. And the media company’s product development director Robert Hutchinson says that the company aims to become as flexible as BuzzFeed and the Huffington Post in terms of its digital storytelling capabilities.
Fairfax is starting to challenge the Herald’s dominance in Auckland with a series of campaigns that aim to draw the Super City’s denizens to its publication. The most recent effort involved an activation at Art in the Dark, which saw event attendees queue in long lines to enter the Stuff tent to get a shot at literally creating art out of light. Once inside the tent, Kiwis would be given LED glowsticks and were then told to draw or write in the air. These actions were then captured using long-exposure photography, resulting in a host of creative images that were tagged with the Stuff brand.
Recently, StopPress ran a story in which Fairfax’s group executive editor Sinead Boucher said Stuff was working on a strategy to overtake Yahoo in terms of online visitor numbers. And this has now come to fruition with Nielsen’s statistics for October showing that the Fairfax-owned media property received more unique visitors over the course of the month than Yahoo.
It doesn’t take much to get a scolding on social media these days and the masses always smell blood when whoopsies like the AFR’s major front page gaffe, or the Herald’s mistaken identity (and mixed up movie quotes) are spotted. And here’s another (small) one from Stuff on a story about Dunedin.
Greenpeace has been left in the awkward position of inadvertently distributing the photography of Alain Marfat-Renodier, a man who was involved in the 1985 bombing of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand. This situation comes about after it was revealed that one of Marfat’s photographs taken of a variety of animals around a Namibian watering hole was included in the not-for-profit organisation’s annual calendar (image credit: Stuff).
APN recently sent out a release pointing out that Nielsen had been undercounting audience to the Herald’s mobile site for about nine months—meaning that the battle for mobile eyes was inadvertently skewed in favour of Stuff. This error has now been corrected, so we decided to have a look at which publication is winning battle for mobile eyes.
An unfortunate coincidence perhaps, but it was chokes from all quarters on the Stuff website earlier this morning as the lead headline screamed about Emirates Team New Zealand’s America’s Cup loss while further down on the front page there was a story about a US doctor saving a lady who choked on a piece of meat.
We had to wonder recently if Stuff’s website was trying to show us what happens when the honeymoon is over – as its wallpaper promoting a dating site shared the front page with a less romantic story.
APN won the pitch for Tourism Australia’s media business recently, relieving Fairfax of its duties. But now Fairfax has a broader range of destinations to promote, after signing a deal with the House of Travel that encompasses contextual commerce and co-created content.
Last week Vodafone took out the awkward ad placement award, and we’ve got a contender for this week’s edition, with an ad on Stuff promoting ‘beach fale fun in the sun’ in Samoa running alongside a story warning of a tsunami. Pesky news, always wreaking havoc with those commercial messages.
Rural Press and Fairfax Media merged in late 2006 – giving Fairfax a considerable portfolio of rural and farming mastheads. The news company this week launched a new web portal to house this content called NZ Farmer, built inside of its venerable Stuff.co.nz system.
Journalists in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but we feel this editorial decision by Stuff should be preserved for posterity.
With only so many minutes in the day (1440 to be precise) there’s not much time for lolly-gagging about when looking for which news articles are worth reading and which are not. Ferald is an extension for the Chrome browser which takes the hassle out of this equation for New Zealander news consumers.
Not surprisingly, the relaunch of the New Zealand Herald as a tabloid and the redesign of the nzherald.co.nz website have dominated most of the attention in the newspaper sphere in recent weeks. But Fairfax has a few tricks up its sleeve as well and it has announced the launch of Stuff Nation, a repository for user-generated content and a more personalised news experience that promises to “transform the landscape of New Zealand journalism”—and the way Fairfax Digital delivers media packages in New Zealand.
The race for convergence means hitherto distinct media entities are cutting each other’s lunch. TV and radio stations now have their own news websites, while news sites are increasingly moving into TV’s realm with video content. We wrote about it a few months back, and now the country’s most popular news site is now officially available on the big screen, as Fairfax Digital launches its Stuff IPTV Channel on Sony Internet TVs (smart TVs).
New Zealand’s passion for the RWC has already been shown through the massive TV ratings. And, not surprisingly, the major online publishers are also sitting pretty, with Nielsen Market Intelligence data showing the aggregate average daily unique browser numbers for all New Zealand websites in the sports category in September increasing by 58 percent to 332,837 compared to September 2010 (210,408) and 62 percent compared to March this year (205,688).
As a trade publication, there’s not much more we can add to the comprehensive media coverage of the earthquake being offered by New Zealand’s television, radio and print/online media outfits (Vicki Anderson’s take on events is particularly vivid). Obviously, industry issues are the least of everybody’s concerns when there have been so many fatalities in Christchurch and our families, friends and colleagues are going through utter hell, so first and foremost the thoughts of everyone here—and the thoughts of the industry as a whole—are with our embattled countryfolk. But the fact that TV3 and Stuff bid for Google search terms around the earthquake does raise some interesting ethical issues, particularly when the practice is frowned upon overseas. Judging by the comments on the story, some felt it was reprehensible, some felt it was kosher because the information was relevant and some even felt we were giving favourable treatment to TVNZ and nzherald.co.nz. But as of this morning, Tower was the only remaining advertiser on Google search and Stuff and TV3 had removed their paid listings, which seems to be an acknowledgment from the companies or their media agencies that doing so in the first place was bad form.
When it comes to increasing eyeballs, natural disasters are, rather perversely, usually good news for media owners. But where does the line get drawn? Is it acceptable for TV3 and Stuff to bid for search terms around the Christchurch earthquake? When TVNZ has committed to commercial free broadcasts from 6pm through to 12pm tomorrow and promised to make good on any campaigns impacted by the event and Google has set up a people finder (although it also benefits from the search purchasing), it seems awfully cynical to try and benefit from the disaster. As one media insider says, “this is not a time to increase traffic through to a website through paid means”.
The NBR gave Stuff’s digital billboard promotion a bit of grief this week after it suffered from a few technical difficulties. But the glitches have obviously been ironed out and Fairfax is now using arbitrary capitalisation to trumpet the arrival of “New Zealand’s First Interactive News Billboard” in Aotea Square in Auckland.
Small, very New Zealandy and not very old agency Josh&Jamie is steadily becoming not so small, continuing its solid run of victories after taking Fairfax Media’s online news-site Stuff.co.nz off incumbent Big Communications in a competitive pitch.
Fairfax Media is harnessing the raw power of the crowd to try and weed out a few more dodgy financial dealings from our elected officials, giving the public the chance to trawl through the thousands of pages of credit card transactions and receipts from 2003 to 2010 that were collated by The Department of Internal Affairs and review them online.
