N&D 11/03/2016

Has social media ruined the web?http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/dec/31/has-social-media-ruined-the-web

Has the web lost its power to drive social change? This is the conclusion of Iranian blogger Hossein Derakhshan, imprisoned by the regime in 2008 and released and pardoned in 2014.  

The rise of smartphones and apps had changed the online world. Blogging and independent websites had been overtaken by social media networks, with the likes* of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram dominating the market.

·                     "Nearly every social network now treats a link as just the same as it treats any other object – the same as a photo, or a piece of text. You’re encouraged to post one single hyperlink and expose it to a quasi-democratic process of liking and plussing and hearting. But links are not objects, they are relations between objects. This objectivisation has stripped hyperlinks of their immense powers"

Sun website traffic falls by more than 5% despite axing of paywall

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/21/sun-website-traffic-paywall-december

The Sun saw a more than 5% fall in its audience in December, despite dropping its paywall fully for the first time on 30 November.A spokesperson attributed the decline to “certain apps being turned off to unify the Sun online presence and the expected seasonal lull in Dream Team”. Much of the site’s content was also already free before the paywall was officially dropped, as the site began relaxing its approach to charging for online content last summer.However, the Sun outperformed the rest of the UK’s national newspapers, which saw bigger falls during the month, according to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Their Christmas traffic declines followed gains made in November, which were partly driven by public interest in stories such as the Paris attacks.theguardian.com fell from an average of more than 9 million daily unique browsers in November to just under 8 million, a drop of 15%, while the Telegraph slid to 4.1 million after losing almost 1 million unique browsers, equivalent to almost 20% of its audience.All the other national newspapers saw double-digit declines, except Mail Online, which lost just under 10% of its audience to drop back to just over 13 million unique browsers, and dailystar.co.uk, which lost 8.8% of its unique browsers to come in at just under 600,000 a day.