The most efficient Ukrainian media brands

The purpose of our study is to identify the potential of popular media as platforms for spreading ideas or facts, their ability to attract the attention of the audience to their content in the Internet net and provoke online (and eventually offline) discussion.

Adherence to journalistic standards, analysis of the content, business-models, ownership and financial performance of the media were not taken into account, although they undoubtedly affect the reputation and efficiency of the media platforms.

The index is calculated on the basis of 5 factors available for the quantitative measurement and comprehensively characterize the effectiveness of the media brand.

To adjusting values measured on different scales to a common scale, we "normalized" them: the highest value in the sample for each scale is expressed by 100% (or 1). Shares (proportions between different values ​​of the scale) is what we see on the charts.

Finally, in order to obtain an index of efficiency, we determined the "weight" of each factor by conducting a small expert survey.

15 people took part in the survey (5 journalists, 5 media experts, 3 PR-specialists, 1 media manager and 1 representative of media policymaking and regulatory authority). After calculating the mean values of the responses, we received the following weight factors: Attendance - 0.2; Citation - 0,2; Citation Reach - 0.17; Quality Traffic - 0.23; Facebook Engagement - 0.2.

What's in the index?

Attendance

We measured attendance based on the average monthly number of unique hosts on the site according to the SimilarWeb data for August-December 2017. For the media with several domains, attendance rates were summed up.

Quality traffic

In addition to the total number of hosts, the effectiveness is influenced by the size of "quality" audience, readers who are really interested in the information they read. Because the quality of traffic received from referrals is difficult to control, we have decided to take the total volume of search, direct, and social traffic as an indicator (data for December 2017, SimilarWeb).

Citation

What media are most often referred by other media? We have measured the number of media references in the sample of TOP-100 most visited Ukrainian sites throughout the year, and removed all cases of self-citing. 

Citation Reach

The number of publications with a link to the source does not tell us about the size of the audience that reads these publications, so as an additional parameter, we introduced the total coverage of all publications with links to the above media within a month (the audience is determined only for references for December 2017). The data enables an approximate comparison of the media audience whose primary source was a particular media.

Facebook Engagement

Finally, social networking is a powerful tool for engaging the audience, and the key one for the Ukrainian media is still Facebook. We evaluated the effectiveness of media pages with the Fanpage Karma service during December 2017. As a performance criterion, we chose the monthly number of all likes, shares and comments that does not depend neither on the total number of followers, nor on the number of posts on the page.

What we learned?

• There are no surprises in the ranking of media efficiency: the media which sites have the biggest visits rates are on the top, but the order is slightly changed. There are some discoveries beyond the top-5, in particular, Radio Liberty, which articles in 2017 were distributed more often than the content of popular Ukrainska Pravda.

• Attendance and citation rates are far from always interconnected. If the attendance rates indicate the popularity of the media (and the intensity of presence in aggregators), the citation shows the potential for the distribution of content placed on it. Among the both visited and widely-cited media, one can mention the TSN and the Ukrainska Pravda.

• DW and Radio Liberty unexpectedly hit the TOP-10 media brands in terms of audience reach of the quoted messages (top positions are usually occupied by the sites of TV channels and news agencies). It turned out that domestic outlines often use sites of Ukrainian and Russian DW services as sources of international news, while the site of Ukrainian Radio Libert is extremely popular among other mass media as the primary source of Schemes: Corruption in Details program. Among the sources that are neither an information agency nor a part of a multimedia holding, in addition to the above-mentioned, only LigaBusinessInform can be mentioned among leaders.

• The most cited TV channel on the Ukrainian Internet in 2017 was 112. In general, we can state that the "Internet" could not overcome the "TV" - instead, the latter himself came to the Internet to grasp the audience. TV channels can be found in the list of leaders by any indicator: TSN and 24 channels are among the top 10 by site attendance, the sum of "high-quality traffic" and engagement of the audience on their FB-pages. In addition, the TSN and 112 channels are among the top 10 by the number of quotes, and the share of TV-channels among the top 15 media by citation reach is one-third.

• "Young" channels, which are strongly focused on digital, such as Espresso, Hromadske, and NewsOne, are getting quite well with the Facebook audience. These media entered the TOP-15 by the number of FB-Engagement to their content, which helped to improve their performance in the overall ranking.