Current status: Winning at the internet with Trinity Mirror

Last week Digiday had a piece looking at Trinity Mirror’s success with digital experimentation. It’s always lovely to see things you’ve worked on having a real effect on a company. Here’s a couple of key points from Chris Smith’s piece…

“In the past 15 months, the company has developed four new journalism startups: UsVsThem, a viral distractions site; Ampp3d, a data journalism site; thepeople.co.uk, a digital extension of The Sunday People newspaper; and digital sports section Row Z, part of the main newspaper website. These offshoot sites have contributed millions of unique users to the combined reach of the company in the short time they have been running: Digital revenues at the company increased over the past six months by 47.5 percent to £14.9 million ($25.1 million), and average monthly unique users grew by a whopping 91 percent to 61.3 million in the same period.”

Malcolm Coles, general manager of online, is quoted as saying:

“When you do these spin-offs, they need to stand on their own two feet, and they’re only going to be a main source of traffic for your main website if you launch them off your main website. That was one of the reasons we deliberately launched Row Z properly on the Mirror and fully integrated it.”

and

“One of the other things we’ve found from those new innovations is it has made hiring good people easier. They can see that there is permission at Trinity Mirror to experiment and innovate. You can show that you can come to Trinity Mirror and do new and exciting things.”

Talking of which – I’m currently hiring for a Head of Social Content.

And you may have already spotted how swift the growth of the mobile audience is for Mirror.co.uk in my blog post on the topic last week:

“July has been the first month where every hour of every day Mirror.co.uk’s mobile traffic has been larger than its desktop traffic.”

I’m not entirely sure about the picture of my boss Malcolm Coles that Digiday have on file though…