No, I haven’t forgotten about ATNIX this week – but a less than straightforward homeward trip and a bad cold have conspired against my getting the results for week 31 (30 July – 5 August) out any earlier. But, better late, than never, here they are, hopefully to be followed by ATNIX 32/2012 in a few days. Of all weeks, this – the first week of the London 2012 Olympic Games – is where we’d expect to see any appreciable impact of the games coverage on what links are being shared; let’s see what we can find.
Standard background information: this analysis is based on tracking all tweets which contain links pointing to the URLs of a large selection of leading Australian news and opinion sites. For technical reasons, it does not contain ‘button’ retweets, but manual retweets (“RT @user …”) are included. Datasets for those sites which cover more than just news and opinion (abc.net.au, sbs.com.au, ninemsn.com.au) are filtered to exclude irrelevant sections of those sites (e.g. abc.net.au/tv, catchup.ninemsn.com.au). For our analysis of ‘opinion’ link sharing, we include only those sub-sections of mainstream sites which contain opinion and commentary (e.g. abc.net.au/unleashed, articles on theaustralian.com.au which include ‘/opinion’ in the URL), and compare them with dedicated opinion and commentary sites.
See the posts tagged ‘ATNIX’ on this site for a full collection of previous results.
ATNIX Week 31: 30 July 2012 – 5 Aug. 2012
First, to the sharing of news-related links: week 31 was a slightly chunkier week again – we captured some 155,000 tweets linking to our news sites. Attention is distributed following a fairly familiar pattern:
There are few surprises here, though this itself is perhaps surprising: certainly, there’s no substantial boost for the Australian host broadcaster of the Olympic Games, Channel Nine, and its nineMSN news site (which also includes the Wide World of Sports sub-site). Indeed, nineMSN falls back a few places on the leaderboard compared to last week, which saw its numbers boosted by a runaway story about local One Direction fans burning their concert tickets – looks like the Olympics can’t compete with such viral stories.
This failure to offer attractive, share-worthy online content is probably in keeping with Nine’s overall markedly lacklustre performance in covering these Games – but assuming that Australian users aren’t generally abstaining from sharing links related to the Games, what do they link to? Our data offer two interpretations: either Games-related links are distributed across our sites in proportion to general patterns of attention and loyalty, and so fail to make an impression on the shape of this leaderboard – or Australian users have taken to sharing links directly from overseas Games-related sites (such as the London 2012 Website or BBC News) which aren’t included in the list of sites we track. That said: given the blanket coverage of the Games in other media, it is very much possible that users simply don’t feel the need to share a significant number of Games links on Twitter.
On to the opinion and commentary sites, for whom we recorded some 16,000 tweets this week:
There’s little significant movement here, but a strong performance by the Sydney Morning Herald’s opinion section should be noted – its marketshare is usually around 18-20%, making the 23% this week an especially strong result. There doesn’t seem to be any specific story driving this bump, though: a number of widely-shared stories combined to make the SMH stand out a little further this week.
As always, the daily patterns reveal further detail – first, for news:
Here, a sustained peak on Tuesday and Wednesday sees news.com.au briefly trouble ABC News for second place in the pecking order – and as with nineMSN’s One Direction frenzy last week, it’s an entertainment story gone viral which is responsible: a piece about Snoop Dogg’s rebranding as Snoop Lion as he explores his love for reggae, which received some 3,700 tweets. It’s worth pointing out again in this context that our index simply tracks any tweets on Twitter which contain links to the Australian news sites we track – so what these cases point to is the added boost Australian news sites get when one of their stories goes viral to an international audience. Post a story which is of relevance to Australian users only, and you’ll get a few hundred tweets; post one which is of interest to an international audience, and happens to be found by enough Twitter users to be widely shared, and you’re into the thousands.
In the absence of such international attention, purely home-grown spikes in attention are necessarily smaller – and this week, it’s the Courier-Mail which clocks up not one, but two notable domestic success stories. First, on 1 August it zooms past the 1,000 tweets/day barrier which is usually well beyond its abilities by posting a piece on the $2.6b which Australians are spending on food and drink for Olympics parties; that story alone was shared more than 600 times on Wednesday alone, accounting for nearly half of all tweets with links to the Courier-Mail Website that day. And on the weekend, the paper again punched well above its usual weight, once more clocking up well over 1,000 tweets/day when its weekend averages are usually closer to 500 tweets/day. Here, a story about the Queensland Government’s decision to discontinue a statewide breast cancer screening programme was the focus, and received over 1,200 tweets over the weekend.
Finally, not on the chart but also noteworthy: on 31 July, the normally almost invisible NT News site received more than seven times its usual, meagre average of 35 tweets/day. The story responsible: “Why I Stuck a Cracker Up My Clacker.” Words fail.
On to the daily opinion and commentary trends, then, which underline the strong performance by the SMH’s opinion section:
While there’s a defined spike on 1 August, there really is no one specific cause for it; the strongest story that day concerned the posting of injudicious social media comments by a Vodafone staffer and received some 200 tweets, but several other stories also made it past the 100 tweets mark. Sometimes, coincidence is just coincidence.
So much for this week, then – we’ll see in a few days whether the Olympic Games do feature more strongly in our index during their final week…