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KentOnline
The ‘flagship’ of the KM Media Group’s expanding digital output, the title serves a growing number of readers in the county of Kent and beyond. It complements our new and emerging digital platforms, including a podcast, app and newsletters. The site's focus has been on using our position as a trusted news provider in the county to talk to the people behind the headlines and tell their stories, with the aims of informing, engaging, entertaining and helping our readers. This is reflected in our growing readership and dwell time. The audience for KentOnline has increased by 14% over the past year in terms of page views, while our unique user base grew by 16%. The website averages 28,066,731 page views a month, at an average 3,800,430 unique users. KentOnline’s focus on quality long-form journalism has helped boost the website's average engaged time per session to three minutes 36 seconds over the past year. Research published by Press Gazette illustrates the depth of KentOnline’s engagement with readers, with the website topping the table for average dwell time per user among regional websites. Audiences spent an average of more than 12 minutes per user with our site, making it the only title to make double figures (graph included with supporting materials). On top of this, we now have more than 50,000 registered users signed up for our newsletters, which include our redesigned and in-depth Daily Briefing every morning plus the afternoon News Alert. Our subscription app has an average dwell time of 32 minutes 52 seconds.
The daily KentOnline Podcast has had more than half a million downloads over the past year. Over the last 12 months, we have also launched a separate section of the website, called KM Decades, dedicated to our extensive newspaper and digital archive. This includes a means of searching for online stories by date as well as providing a one-stop shop for pictures and features from our files, going back over a century - underlining our reputation as a long-standing source for trusted news in the county. Other new sections on the homepage include Opinion, Trending, Podcasts and Kent Politics. We have also introduced a 'Listen to this article' function to our website in order to make our news more accessible to users with a range of health and learning challenges. The level of audience engagement enjoyed by KentOnline is vindication of our focus on detailed, in-depth reporting that is not afraid to challenge authority and even our own readers. A few examples of our work are included in the attachment for the supporting material section.