Links: friending Russians and giving Google

A few things that have caught my eye in the past week.

Russians are the most engaged in social media

Publicitas points to a comScore study ranking Russia, Israel and Turkey at the top of a league table of time spent on social networks. Russia led with 9.8 average hours per visitor a month, Israel with 9.2 and Turkey 7.6. The UK came in fourth with 7.2.

Vkontakte.ru ranked as the top social networking site in Russia with 27.8 million visitors, followed by Odnoklassniki with 16.7 million visitors. Despite Facebook’s strong leadership position both worldwide and in the majority of individual Internet markets, it ranked just fifth in Russia with 4.5 million visitors. However, its audience has grown 376 percent in the past year, outpacing each of the other top five social networking sites in the market.

The same study showed the search portal Yantex Sites was the biggest internet property in the market.

Google donates $5m towards journalism innovation

Google is giving $5 million to non-profits investing in digital journalism innovation.

We’ve granted $2 million to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which has a proven track record of supporting programs that drive innovation in journalism. It will use $1 million to support U.S. grant-making in this crucial area. The other $1 million will augment the Knight News Challenge, which is accepting funding proposals from anyone, anywhere in the world, until December 1. Now in its fifth year, the News Challenge has supported projects likeDocumentCloud, which aims to bring more investigative-reporting source material online so anyone can find and read it.

We’re eager to do even more internationally, so we will be investing the remaining $3 million in journalism projects in other countries through a similar partnership. Stay tuned for more details early next year.

I wonder if NZ could put its hand up? Don’t think we have a comparable non-profit organisation investing in digital journalism innovation though. Not yet, anyway.

US newspaper circulation loses 5%

Editor & Publisher reports on latest ABCs in the US:

Average weekday circulation for 635 U.S. dailies dropped 5%, based on a cumulative average for the period ended Sept. 30, from a year earlier. The decline follows year-to-year decreases of 8.7% in the six months through March 31 and 11% through Sept. 30, 2009. Sunday circulation for 553 Sunday papers was down 4.5% in the latest period.

• Wall Street Journal, 2,061,142, up 1.82 percent.
• USA Today, 1,830,594, down 3.66 percent
• The New York Times, 876,638, down 5.52 percent.
• Los Angeles Times, 600,449, down 8.67 percent.
• The Washington Post, 545,345 down 6.43 percent.
• (New York) Daily News, 512,520 down 5.82 percent.
• New York Post, 501,501 down 1.29 percent.
• Chicago Tribune, 441,508, down 5.23 percent.
• The Houston Chronicle, 343,952, down 10.53 percent.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer, 342,361, down 5.29 percent.
• Newsday, 314,848, down 11.84 percent.
• Denver Post, 309,863, down 9.12 percent.

MarketWatch says newspapers are recovering, but Wall St isn’t buying

Print-ad spending in newspapers fell 7.6% in the second quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America, to $5.69 billion, after having registered steadily decreasing drops of 42.3%, 40.4%, 37.9%, 31.7% and 14.4% in the previous five quarters.

“You have to look at it in context,” said Ken Doctor, analyst at Outsell Inc., earlier this week. “Advertising overall in the country is rebounding. It’s up by a high-single digit percentage. Broadcasting’s up, cable is up. … The only medium that is still negative is newspaper advertising. And since 85% of newspaper revenue is still print-based, the fact that it’s still down year over year, against an awful 2009, is a really bad sign.”

New ballgame

There are a number of factors driving improved online-ad sales for newspapers. One is that the sales staffs have shifted their focus, said Randy Bennett, senior vice president of business development for the Newspaper Association of America, an industry trade group.

“Newspapers are transforming their sales organizations to go after certain kinds of new online customers, such as non-traditional, medium-sized local businesses who typically advertise in the Yellow Pages. They’re starting to capitalize on those opportunities and pick up some market share.”

BBC Worldwide considers selling ads

Idea comes as the BBC mulls the multi-million pound cuts to its budget under licence fee settlement:

The BBC‘s director of global news, Peter Horrocks, has revealed the corporation is looking at introducing advertising on some of the World Service’s 31 foreign-language websites as part of a “seismic shift” for the whole organisation.

Hosting advertising on some of the World Service’s language sites could provide new revenue for the BBC, Horrocks told staff today. The idea is being considered as BBC executives work out the practical implications of this week’s licence fee settlement, which will see £140m-a-year cut from the corporation’s annual £3.6bn budget, plus additional funding commitments including the World Service.

The Guardian’s MediaTalk crew recorded a panel discussion on the issue and published a podcast:

Recorded live at the Radio Festival in Salford, Matt Wells is joined by Maggie Brown, Paul Robinson and Matthew Bannister to discuss the BBC’s controversial deal with the government to fix the licence fee for six years