See the posts tagged \u2018ATNIX\u2019 on this site for a full collection of previous results.<\/a><\/p>\n First, to the sharing of news-related links: week 31 was a slightly chunkier week again \u2013 we captured some 155,000 tweets linking to our news sites. Attention is distributed following a fairly familiar pattern:<\/p>\n There are few surprises here, though this itself is perhaps surprising: certainly, there\u2019s no substantial boost for the Australian host broadcaster of the Olympic Games, Channel Nine, and its nineMSN<\/em> news site (which also includes the Wide World of Sports<\/em> sub-site). Indeed, nineMSN<\/em> 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 \u2013 looks like the Olympics can\u2019t compete with such viral stories.<\/p>\n This failure to offer attractive, share-worthy online content is probably in keeping with Nine\u2019s overall markedly lacklustre performance in covering these Games \u2013 but assuming that Australian users aren\u2019t 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 \u2013 or Australian users have taken to sharing links directly from overseas Games-related sites (such as the London 2012 Website or BBC News<\/em>) which aren\u2019t included in the list of sites we track. That said: given the blanket coverage of the Games in other media, it is<\/em> very much possible that users simply don\u2019t feel the need to share a significant number of Games links on Twitter<\/em>.<\/p>\n On to the opinion and commentary sites, for whom we recorded some 16,000 tweets this week:<\/p>\n There\u2019s little significant movement here, but a strong performance by the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em>\u2019s opinion section should be noted \u2013 its marketshare is usually around 18-20%, making the 23% this week an especially strong result. There doesn\u2019t seem to be any specific story driving this bump, though: a number of widely-shared stories combined to make the SMH<\/em> stand out a little further this week.<\/p>\n As always, the daily patterns reveal further detail \u2013 first, for news:<\/p>\n Here, a sustained peak on Tuesday and Wednesday sees news.com.au<\/em> briefly trouble ABC News<\/em> for second place in the pecking order \u2013 and as with nineMSN<\/em>\u2019s One Direction frenzy last week, it\u2019s an entertainment story gone viral which is responsible: a piece about Snoop Dogg\u2019s rebranding as Snoop Lion as he explores his love for reggae<\/a>, which received some 3,700 tweets. It\u2019s worth pointing out again in this context that our index simply tracks any tweets on Twitter<\/em> which contain links to the Australian news sites we track \u2013 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\u2019ll get a few hundred tweets; post one which is of interest to an international audience, and happens to be found by enough Twitter<\/em> users to be widely shared, and you\u2019re into the thousands.<\/p>\n In the absence of such international attention, purely home-grown spikes in attention are necessarily smaller \u2013 and this week, it\u2019s the Courier-Mail<\/em> 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<\/a>; 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<\/em> 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\u2019s decision to discontinue a statewide breast cancer screening programme<\/a> was the focus, and received over 1,200 tweets over the weekend.<\/p>\n Finally, not on the chart but also noteworthy: on 31 July, the normally almost invisible NT News<\/em> site received more than seven times its usual, meagre average of 35 tweets\/day. The story responsible: \u201cWhy I Stuck a Cracker Up My Clacker<\/a>.\u201d Words fail.<\/p>\n On to the daily opinion and commentary trends, then, which underline the strong performance by the SMH<\/em>\u2019s opinion section:<\/p>\n While there\u2019s 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<\/a> and received some 200 tweets, but several other stories also made it past the 100 tweets mark. Sometimes, coincidence is just coincidence.<\/p>\n So much for this week, then \u2013 we\u2019ll see in a few days whether the Olympic Games do feature more strongly in our index during their final week\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No, I haven\u2019t forgotten about ATNIX this week \u2013 but a less than straightforward homeward trip and a bad cold have conspired against my getting the results for week 31 (30 July \u2013 5 August) out any earlier. But, better late, than never, here they are, hopefully to be followed by ATNIX 32\/2012 in a … <\/p>\nATNIX Week 31: 30 July 2012 – 5 Aug. 2012<\/h1>\n
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