The Media Blog

Top 10 Media Blog posts from the past week

1. Compare the meerkat: Only in The Guardian part II
2. Daily Mail (once again) pours scorn on Strictly
3. Behold The Sun’s Relentless contradictions over energy drinks
4. ‘Cockney cashpoint’ is classic silly season PR
5. Fake or not, The Guardian let its guard down... seemples!
6. Mail finds 'the internet' to blame for hooliganism and burglary
7. Why Channel 4 had to put Big Brother out of its misery
8. Zoe Griffin begs the question: 'Is crass the new subtle?'
9. Sentimentality alone cannot save the Observer
10. What's troubling Sam, 23 from Manchester today?

BBC REVEALS: Boozy Brits drink on holiday

Never mind all this nay saying in the Daily Mail, the BBC has fought back with a real scoop, revealing:

- English holidaymakers are turning to drink on their holidays

- Drinking and socialising is a key part of most summer holidays

- "Prolonged periods of regular excessive [alcohol] consumption is harmful to your body.”

We already know about Boozy Brits in Spain. We’ve already heard Latvia’s interior minister bemoaning drunken “English pigs”. Is this really a shock?

Of course, it’s down to Department of Health PR. And buried under the eye-wateringly obvious headline findings are some thought-provoking stats. The average British holidaymaker, for example, drinks 80 alcoholic drinks throughout their trip – that’s well over 200 units. Which is rather a lot.

The problem is, scrambling for a news hook, someone has tried to make this stick for summer – in a really anodyne way. And sadly, with a headline like ‘English turn to booze on holiday’, it definitely misses the mark.

Chris Brown, JK Wedding Entrance Dance and unintended consequences

The trouble with applying offline rules to online business is that you fail to account for new models. The music industry has fought perhaps the longest, and most misguided, battle of this sort.

In an effort to protect what has historically been its cash cow (the album) the industry has vigorously gone after illegal downloaders, sharers, rippers and burners. Legally and morally, it's not difficult to side with the musicians and their masters. But logically?

Look what can happen when someone illegal rips a tune. Take the amazingly popular - and funny - JK Wedding Entrance Dance.

Featuring Chris Brown's Forever, the video has now been watched more than 22 million times. By the middle of the summer, Brown's single reached number four on the iTunes singles chartand number three on Amazon's best selling MP3 list - and it has continued to sell steadily ever since. That's over a year since its official release.

It is arguable whether either the music industry or the artist deserve this kind of luck, but luck they have had.

As the media industry obsesses over paywalls and micropayments, it would do well to look at the story of Chris Brown and the JK Wedding Entrance Dance.

Related:
- Free is just another cover price
- What Chris Brown’s YouTube Apology Tells Us About New Media
- What if the business model for news ain’t broke?

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Don't write that freesheet obituary just yet

You may recall earlier this week how a picture of Tony Blair's former spin doctor Alistair Campbell featured erroneously on another man's obituary. Well, expect his name to be added to Wikipedia's list of premature obits any time soon.

Another entry for that list? The freesheet.

Despite the demise of thelondonpaper, the layoffs at the Metro and fashionable talk of paid-for online content, the freesheets has still got a lot of life in its lungs.

As I argue in my latest piece for Journalism.co.uk - Free is just another cover price - :

thelondonpaper isn’t closing because the model was flawed but because News International either couldn’t make it work in the current economic climate or was unwilling to give a paper, still in its infancy, the time it needed to become commercially viable.

Not to mention that it was only ever designed to be a spoiler (which may mean that the spoiler's spoiler, aka London Lite, may go the same way).

Regardless, if you want to know why you'll still get mugged by a freesheet vendor at a station near you, continue reading: Free is just another cover price.

Related:
- Born Free: Why the free-sheets’ law of the jungle is a joke
- Scarcity, Abundance And The Misapprehension Of Online Advertising

Born Free: Why the freesheets’ law of the jungle is a joke

Two men are crossing the Serengeti when one stops in his tracks and says: “Jonathan, stop where you are…we’re being watched by a lion”.

Sure enough through the long grass the men make out the attentive ears and eyes of a hungry looking lion, guarding his pride and edging closer, staying low to the ground as it stalks the two men.

Slowly the men begin to back away, and as they do one notices the other is kicking off his walking shoes and reaching into his backpack for a pair of running shoes.

“Jonathan, what are you doing, you’ll never outrun that thing, with or without running shoes.”

“I don’t need to outrun it Rupert. I just need to outrun you,” he says.

Why am I telling this rather old joke? Because The Metro has today announced 30 job cuts amid growing speculation also about the future of the London Lite, the Daily Mail & General Trust’s evening free-sheet.

Was the DMGT trying to outrun the economy, or just outrun Rupert Murdoch’s London Paper for as long as it could or as long as it needed to?

UK's top 10 news aggregators

Another interesting piece of number crunching from the people at Hitwise.

Robin Goad began the week looking at the Ashes effect on the UK internet landscape (mixing business and pleasure, I suspect). He ends it by looking at the relative power of aggregators in disseminating the stuff of news producers.

The peg? The entrance of a relative newcomer in the shape of Bing News Search. And Bing is straight in at, er, number nine:

Top 10 News Aggregators in the UK

1. Google News UK (36% of visits)
2. NewsNow (20%)
3. Digg (12%)
4. Stumble Upon (9%)
5. Ezine Articles (7%)
6. Google News (6%)
7. Google Reader (4%)
8. Reddit (2%)
9. Bing News Search (2%)
10. NetVibes (1%)

(source: Hitwise, w/e 22 August 2009)

Goad notes:

Last week just over three quarters of Bing News Search’s traffic came from other Microsoft properties, particularly MSN UK and the main Bing search page.

So where are these aggregators sending people? Google News is largely sending people where you would expect. The news sites with the largest reach (BBC, Telegraph and Mail Online among them) are receiving most referrals.

Bing is different. BBC remains number one but is followed by Fox News while Times of India features at number four.

Related:
- What Would Google Do? Fail Quietly.
- ‘I Consider Google News A Gift, Newspapers Consider It Theft.’

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Behold The Sun’s Relentless contradictions over energy drinks

The Sun has issues with energy drinks…

Are high energy drinks killing you? (9 July 2009)

Energy drink drove my son to hang at 11 (8 May 2009)

Worry over kid caffeine addicts (4 September 2008)

Red Bull heart attack risk (15 August 2008)

Beware: Red Bull can kill (7 November 2007)

…you get the picture.

But did you get the voucher? 

'What voucher?' I hear you ask; why the voucher for a free can of ‘Relentless’ energy drink for every Sun reader in the paper this week.

That’s right, The Sun this week had issues with energy drinks, pictured right (click to enlarge).

“Here’s an offer that will give you a boost…” said the offer, making curiously little mention of The Sun's own past suggestions that such drinks could also give people something more life-threatening than "a boost", such as a stroke or a heart attack.

“The energy drink…is bound to perk up your day,” it added.

Too right it is, one can of Relentless contains 160 mg of caffeine. That's twice the amount of caffeine in a can of Red Bull.

 

Daily Mail (once again) pours scorn on Strictly

Amanda Platell continues her role as the Mail’s fearless anti-BBC crusader today – with Strictly Come Dancing once again the object of her scorn.

The Mail’s coverage of the Strictly ‘ageism row’ has already been discussed here. It’s sometimes easy to forget:

(a)    It’s a show full of dancing D-listers; and
(b)    Co-host Bruce Forsyth is at least 100 years old.

But in addition to her “Come back Arlene!” clarion call, there’s also a hilarious box-out of the writer’s Strictly dream team. Some of her choices are as tasteless as the costumes themselves (continues...):

EVAN DAVIS: Partnered with Brendan Cole
Evan Davis… dancing with a man! Because he’s GAY, geddit?

JONATHAN ROSS: At least we might get a bit of entertainment in return for his vast salary
Really. It’s OK. You don’t have to reference Ross in every single article about the BBC.

CASTER SEMENYA: To see whether she leads or not
Hahaha! Because Semenya looks like a man!

You never know, with all this media speculation and ridicule, she might even attempt suicide like another gender-questioned athlete. Now that really would be ‘Murder on the Dancefloor’ – see what I did there?!

Why Ashes 2009 really was a shared national moment

According to Mark Lawson writing in today's TV Matters column in the Guardian:

These Ashes felt less like a shared national moment because fewer of the nation shared it.

There's no doubt the numbers are compelling - Channel 4 averaged three million viewers when it broadcast the 2005 series while this time around Sky Sports had just 850,000.

Even allowing for the two million that tuned into Five's terrestrial highlights on Sunday night, millions of TV cricket fans have gone missing this summer.

There's little doubt too that TV does matter, as the column's title insists, which incidentally is why live events - not just sport but news too - represent the TV industry's most robust challenge to a time-shifted, platform-shifted, fragmented future.

This aside, England's 2009 cricketing success was a "shared national moment", perhaps even a shared international moment.

Witness the spikes in traffic specialist and generalist sports sites enjoyed on Sunday. More importantly, witness the conversations that were happening on the truly social parts of the web - #Ashes was a regular in the Twitter trending topics top 10 throughout July and August.

And most unexpectedly, the BBC's Test Match Special became the social hub. With some five million listeners sharing the experience.

As Christopher Martin-Jenkins - the TMS veteran who was given the microphone at the game's denouement - noted in Monday's Times:

Emails had poured in to Test Match Special from all quarters of the globe yesterday, including Mozambique, Ghana, South Georgia and the base camp at Everest.

Many were describing where they were and what they were doing when Andrew Flintoff threw down Rick Ponting's stumps. But the one from Ghana demonstrates best how a broadcaster can become a social conduit in the digital age.

Suitably, this story was recorded on the TMS Facebook blog:

We had a text from one listener tuning to TMS via his mobile phone on a beach in Ghana. His message was that his wife had forgotten to pack a phone charger and he was desperately searching for a listener who would just happen to be also on the same beach and could help.

A few seconds later, Josh Grainger contacted the programme to say: "Hello, I heard the e-mail you've just read out, and i have got two spare phone chargers, i'm in Halloway beach in Ghana, hope it helps. I'm wearing a fluorescent yellow top, so I'll be easy to see!"

Welcome to the new shared experience.

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com

Mail finds 'the internet' to blame for hooliganism and burglary

 Today’s Daily Mail has a double whammy of bad news for fans of ‘the internet’, finding the worldwide web is responsible not only for a resurgence of football violence but it is also to blame for a potential increase in burglary.

First up:

Rampage of the cyberthugs

The internet is fuelling a terrifying resurgence in football violence involving veteran hooligans, say police sources. Fans officially banned from grounds up and down the country are using mobile phones and the web to choreograph punch-ups before and after matches.

Damn you, ‘the internet’! Though even the Mail admits, in the same article, that the recent and entirely predictable scenes when Millwall and West Ham fans clashed recalled “the mayhem-scarred Seventies and Eighties - when Saturday afternoon meant violence”…and mobile phones and the internet were nowt but a twinkle in the hooligans’ eyes.

Moving on:

Burglars 'shop' for victims' personal details on networking sites

Users of social networking websites could face higher insurance premiums because burglars are using them to 'shop' for victims' personal details. Many of the millions of users of these sites post details about their home, whereabouts and holiday plans on them - effectively an invitation to a burglar.

Outrageous! Shouldn’t we strip Tim Berners-Lee of his knighthood for inventing this evil and forcing it upon us? Or, maybe the use of the word ‘could’ warns of some degree of speculation here?

In order to follow most sensible people on Facebook, a burglar would need to be their friend. And, if they are their friend then they probably already know where they live and when they’re going on holiday, though may not feel inclined to burgle their house (due to aforementioned friendship).

‘But the Mail has a case study of somebody who went to Glastonbury and got burgled while she was away, having mentioned the annual festival on her Facebook page,’ I hear you protest in defence of the Mail's sound logic.

True (assuming it is). But where else did she mention her trip to Glasto? On the train, or in a taxi home one evening that dropped her at her door? At the hairdressers or down the local pub from where it would be easy to follow her back? Or maybe, just maybe, walking out her front door with a tent, sleeping bag and 45 litre rucksack on her back was a bit of a giveaway.

In truth, social networking is likely to be a far less useful and practical tool to burglars than their own eyes and ears in the local community. Even opportunism and dumb luck will likely play a greater role. But then, that kind of pragmatism wouldn't be 'news', and nor would it fit with the Mail's overarching premise that 'the internet', along with other evils such as 'foreigners', is very likely to bring down society, or at least give us a nasty touch of cancer; somehow.

Why Channel 4 had to put Big Brother out of its misery

If there was a Dignitas equivalent for television programmes then Big Brother should have bought a one-way ticket to Geneva about five or six years ago. However, Channel 4 has finally stepped in and read the last rites to the failing format, announcing this year’s disastrous ratings flop will be the penultimate series.

Expect a flurry of racism, sex and sexism scandals in next year’s final hurrah, but there is no disguising the death throws will still be just that. Google Trends’ 'heart monitor' (below) shows clearly that Big Brother has been in terminal decline for the past five years.

The top blue line (below) shows UK searches for "Big Brother" and shows waning interest among the public. The bottom line of the top chart, shows news reference volume (mentions in the media). Don't be fooled by an apparent increase in interest during 2008 - 2009... these were articles about Jade Goody as the bottom chart clearly shows (searches don't spike, note, as people would invariably have searched for information on Goody using her name, while reports invariably mentioned the show that made her famous).

What's troubling Sam, 23 from Manchester today?

The News In Briefs is something of a guilty pleasure each day, as writing it is for the sub editors on The Sun I am sure, as they look to push the bounds of what might credibly have been said by one of their models. Today's is probably not one for the 'young people don't know what hard work is' brigade:

Zoe Griffin begs the question: 'Is crass the new subtle?'

I'm probably a bit slow to this one, but I've seen a few people on Twitter talking about Voltz energy drinks today on the back of some awful blog posts by Zoe Griffin (no, I hadn’t either).

If like me you’re wondering who she is, according to Zoe herself: “I am the UK’s coolest party girl. I only go to the best parties and I am at the heart of the action when I’m there. I don’t get starstruck by celebrities because I’ve met all of the biggest stars already.”

She’s also a blogger and used to hold down a showbiz reporter role on one of the tabloids I’m told (I know, I assumed she was a spoof too!).

A few weeks ago it seems Zoe bumped into Aidan Gillen from TV show The Wire at some tremendous showbiz shindig. And what did she tell the star?

“I told him all about my favourite low calorie energy drink, Voltz Energy Shots. Each bottle has just two calories.”

Or how about, more recently:

"All saints are officially over. I bumped into two of the girls from the band last night at Adee Phelans launch for his new range of hair care. Adee’s new products must be good because they are made in the same factory as Voltz energy drinks!"

And:

"I’ve packed my undercover gossip-mongerers off to Chicago with some Voltz Energy shots, which they are totally gonna need to run around the site to meet ALL the acts like the Kings of Leon, Kaiser Chiefs, The Beastie Boys and The Killers."

It’s a piece of product placement so nasty it almost makes my eyes bleed, but it’s got people talking, largely because of how crassly it’s been done. So this begs the question, in the overtly negative world of social media is it better to seek publicity through a rapidly spreading name and shame campaign where the consequences – may be “she’s an awful writer" or "what a shallow person! – are pretty mild but the exposure considerable?

I'd say the jury's out on that one.

It's her blog of course, and she's entitled to write whatever nonsense she likes. And if Voltz - the energy drink made in the same factory as shampoo, apparently - is happy with the placement then the rest of us have the option of just tuning back out to the 30-minute-ago safety of "Zoe who?".

Done.

Fake or not, The Guardian let its guard down... seemples!

You’ve probably seen the heated debate surrounding the Comparethemarket.com adverts.

If you have, you may well have read those claim first on The Guardian’s website where a Comment Is Free piece sparked more than 500 comments before moderators started to cull criticisms, amid chatroom meltdown, and ultimately closed the comment section altogether.

Speculation is now growing that the article was placed as a viral marketing ploy and The Guardian has been spoofed through its over-eagerness to embrace all things PC.

My initial reaction was ‘surely not?’ The Guardian would vet their contributors, surely? Especially when the contributor shares a name with the spokesmodel of a rival company. Surely only the ridiculousness of the article points to the fact it could be phony.

If it does turn out to be a spoof then there will surely be some red faces on The Guardian.

But if it isn’t, there will surely be some red faces on The Guardian as the article being genuine would almost make its publication all the more embarrassing.

See also:

Compare the meerkat: Only in The Guardian part II

Compare the meerkat: Only in The Guardian part II

There’s a confusing piece on Comment is Free today, accusing Aleksandr Orlov – everyone’s favourite meerkat comparer in the comparethemarket.com adverts – of racism:

My girlfriend, who is Ukrainian, turned to me and said: "I don't like this advert, it is very offensive to me." I mentioned it to a friend who said his Latvian lodger also found it offensive.

Peter Jones’s article fails to specify what part of Aleksandr’s portrayal was deemed so offensive. However, as there are no other cultural indicators in the adverts (aside from actual meerkats being African), Jones concentrates on the accent:

The sole point… is, it seems, to highlight the idea that east Europeans cannot pronounce the word market properly when they speak English. It struck me how racist it was to parody what is now a significant part of the British population in this way.

It’s arguable that the ‘east European’ accent discussed is itself a rather gross generalisation. Similarly, Jones’s point that ‘market’ is “a word that eastern Europeans/Russian pronounce "meerkat"” is also baffling. Coming from a part-Ukrainian family, I can confirm no one pronounces ‘market’ like ‘meerkat’ – unless I’m missing some dialectal quirk. Rather, market just sounds a bit like meerkat in general, doesn't it?

It's difficult to note any other Slavonic stereotype in Aleksandr aside from his accent. Certainly nothing anywhere near the negative image of the UK's Polish community in some of our national press.

It’s curious that so many editors allow their content to descend to self-parody. There’s the Mail and its outrageously misleading scare stories. There’s the local press and its ‘custard shortage’ and ‘missing cats’ mundanity. And now, we’re in danger of the Guardian fulfilling its own peculiar caricature. 

(So far, Aleksandr has maintained a dignified silence. Thanks to Shane Richmond for the tip.)

‘Cockney cashpoint’ is classic silly season PR

Uncovering popular appeal in banality is part of PR’s daily grind. But occasionally, a story emerges that captivates with its simplicity.

The Cockney cash machine – which lets users get their sausage and mash, check their balance on the Charlie Sheen and so on and so forth – comes courtesy of a national ATM operator (Bank Machine).

And would you Adam and Eve it? Journalists were so bewitched by headline opportunities that this has gone everywhere. The story cleverly explores a number of angles, in a rare campaign that covers all media bases:

Broadsheets

The Times reports that Bank Machine “hopes that ATMs will serve to keep… dialects alive in Britain". The company’s cultural objective, albeit dubious, is well suited to the broadsheet agenda.

Tabloids

The pun-hungry redtops have lapped it up. The Mirror quotes the Bank Machine boss: “We wanted something fun and some residents will visit just to have a butcher's.”

Meanwhile, and unsurprisingly, The Sun indulges in its own gratuitous slang.

International

Worldwide press and news sites have seized the opportunity for Anglophilia. The Orlando Sentinel praises British eccentricity (“London keeps giving me reasons to think it’s tipping the scales of awesomeness all the time”) and even The Jamaica Observer delves into the origins of Cockney lingo.

Local / Broadcast

The story had its own report on last night's local BBC news.

And finally, the local press adds some regional flavour, with East London Advertiser giving us directions (“at Bow's famous Roman Road Market, on the corner of Grove Road and St Stephen's Road”, in case you fancy a butcher’s").

Sorry Press Gazette, journalists must answer to market forces too

I saw a rant on Press Gazette’s blogs earlier – subsequently spread via Twitter – bemoaning the wages offered for a B2B editor in the property sector:

The recession was always bound to exert downward pressure on starting wages - but Formula Won Recruitment are surely taking the piss with their advert for a B2B editor “with significant experience” to help produce a “lively mix of magazines and newsletters” in the property sector for a salary of between £18,000 and £25,000.

On the face of things those are pretty low wages, though I suspect “editor” and “significant experience” also disguise the fact a 25-year-old layout sub with a few years experience on a company newsletter could do this standing on their head, and probably will.

But the complaint goes on:

By way of a reality check - a trainee McDonalds manager in Doncaster can look at a starting salary of £18,500 and they also get company car, pension, private health care and a potential bonus.

It is unfortunate that somebody who has always wanted to be a journalist can’t land their dream job right now in what has always been a hugely competitive industry at the best of times. But suggesting it is somehow outrageous that some McJob management trainee may be on similar wages (or £6,500 less per year) to somebody with editorial skills shows an ignorance of how these things work and a degree of snobbery.

There is no escaping supply and demand and the reality of having to pay wages, no matter how hard journalists try to distance themselves from the fact their roles have any kind of commercial dependence.

And let's face it, if media jobs haven’t taken enough of a kicking as it is over the past few years, imagine what has happened to media jobs in the property industry. I'm amazed they're hiring at all, at any level and at any salary.

So: by way of a reality check – a trainee McDonalds manager (who, by the way, must be a graduate, or have previous experience of two management roles) joins a company which has seen seven consecutive quarters of growth and whose profits currently stand at a supersized $1bn+ for their last quarter (I therefore assume there's more to management than flipping burgers).

Meanwhile the UK property market has lost billions, with 32,000 estate agents out of work and more than 20 per cent wiped off the value of the average home. Coupled with that the media industry has seen unprecedented lay-offs over the past year, creating not just a premium on available jobs, but a very skilled pool of available labour.

What was the complaint again?

Sentimentality alone cannot save the Observer

According to the Press Gazette today:

Former Europe minister Denis MacShane has written to one hundred senior MPs of all parties in a bid to safeguard the future of the Observer amid fears... the newspaper could be closed. MacShane, Labour MP for Rotherham and former president of the NUJ [in 1978], is urging colleagues to sign a letter addressed to the Scott Trust, which owns the Observer, urging it to keep the paper going.

I’m not sure what a letter signed by 101 MPs will actually do for the coffers of the loss-making Observer. Perhaps MacShane is unaware of the media revolution threatening to leave many newspapers behind in their traditional format. Or perhaps it's a PR stunt to curry favour with the media-savvy left, given MPs' rough ride in the media in recent months.

Certainly MacShane simply informing the Scott Trust that he and his colleagues would be sad to see the Observer go does little for the economic reality of the situation. I fear his letter-writing would be no more or less successful if he were to send his plea instead to every 21-year-old in the country asking them to buy a newspaper each day, because the internet isn’t all that.

MacShane told Press Gazette: "As a former NUJ president and an occasional contributor to the Observer I don't want it to disappear and another tranche of our best journalists scurrying to find work in PR or learning about Job Seekers Allowance.”

I don’t mean to knock anybody’s best intentions but the naivety of MacShane’s strategy does more than any balance sheet to illustrate the hopelessness of the Observer’s long-term situation.

Perhaps MacShane would be better deployed offering the Observer some advice on cost-cutting instead, given he was able to run an office - albeit in his home garage - for as little as £20,000 per year, according to recent revelations about MPs' expenses. Writing in The Telegraph at that time, MacShane admitted he and his colleagues - who he described as "a Dad's Army of fiddlers" - had "grievously let down the public and deserve...collective shame".

There is a rich irony here, for it was a great many MPs' signatures that breathed fresh life into one ailing newspaper, but sadly it was their signatures on receipts and expense claims rather than on any open letter, that proved so effective.

Top 5 Media Blog posts from the past week

1. Goodbye and goodnight to The London Paper

2. Fox News: Bear with us...

3. Tabloids snap up 99p pregnancy tests: Please be outraged, as we’ve said you will be

4. Daily Mail takes fresh approach to the cut and paste brigade

5. Why all the media love a good 'staycation'

Howzat! What the Ashes did to the web

So, it turns out that we don't just follow the over-by-over stuff - fingers guiltily poised on Alt-Tab* - when we're at work.

Hitwise's Robin Goad has been crunching the all important numbers and it would seem that the Ashes decider had fans logging on in unprecedented numbers. On a beautiful summer Sunday, no less.

Sky Sports enjoyed its best spike ever, boasting 0.74 per cent of all UK internet traffic. For the BBC, only last year's Beijing Olympics outdid the 1.12 per cent it received yesterday.

Meanwhile, Hitwise's category of 100 specialist cricket sites reached its highest level for three years yesterday, collectively accounting for 1.11 per cent of all UK visits.

Doubtless, a Monday finish would have resulted in even more spectacular numbers.

By comparison, Australian cricket websites suffered a dip, down to 0.12 per cent. Must be the time difference.

*For the uninitiated the Alt-Tab key combination will take a PC user from an incriminating, non-work website to an impressive spreadsheet in under 0.01 seconds.

Jon Bernstein is a freelance writer and digital media consultant. He is the former multimedia editor for Channel 4 News.

He also blogs at jonbernstein.wordpress.com