In 2015, Coconuts Media began measuring Total Reach – a combination of website unique users, Facebook unique reach, Youtube views, and Twitter impressions – in 2015, and had its biggest month ever in November, reaching an audience of 14.6 million people across these platforms.
The importance of measuring Total Reach – especially in developing countries where connections are particularly slow and social media effectively is the internet – became particularly apparent to the brand that very month. For example, Nov. 2015 welcomed historic elections in Myanmar as Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy came to power. Coconuts Yangon saw a massive upsurge in Total Reach for its election coverage, although only a modest upsurge in onsite visits. This demonstrated how widely the content was being shared away from the website, especially on Facebook.
Clearly on the same page, Buzzfeed publisher Dao Nguyen announced last month that the viral news and video giant will now also be using Total Reach when reporting on the brand’s metrics.
Even when measuring within the traditional framework of unique website users, however, Coconuts Media has seen huge year-on-year growth of 57 percent to 23 million. The organization recorded 4.16 million unique users in March, its biggest calendar month in 2015. This far outstrips the company’s previous record of 3.11 million unique users from October 2014. The biggest single months of all 10 Coconuts websites combined sums to 5.5 million unique users.
Another indicator of the fact that Coconuts Media content is increasingly being read and spread in the most modern of ways is that the company’s mobile audience has surged to an all-time high of 14.4 million unique users, growing 131 percent year-on-year and now representing 59 percent of total sessions on the site.
Video views across Facebook, YouTube and in-house player Brightcove also saw impressive annual growth of 73 percent, from 4.8 million views in 2014 to 8.35 million last year.
Coconuts Manila was the stand-out performer for the year, with a peak of 1.7 million unique users in November 2015, up from a previous high of 860,000 earlier that year. The site’s Total Reach for that month was 7.5 million.
Last year also saw deeper engagement with Coconuts content in general, with total minutes on the company’s websites increasing by 169 percent, from 20.3 million in 2014 to 54.4 million in 2015. In turn, pages per user increased from 1.92 to 3.07, largely thanks to the implementation of “infinite scroll” navigation style.
And from December 2014 to December 2015, Facebook fans across all Coconuts Media pages increased by 27 percent from 372,557 to 476,541.
Some of Coconuts Media’s top performing stories of 2015 were:
Meet Mui Thomas, a Hong Kong rugby referee with a rare skin condition who hopes to inspire others (Coconuts Hong Kong)
Scientists prove vampire squirrels of Borneo have fluffiest tails in the world (Coconuts Jakarta)
Lee Kuan Yew once uncovered a CIA plot, turned down a $3.3m bribe and embarrassed the US (Coconuts Singapore)
Coconuts TV’s top performing videos of 2015 were:
Pricasso: The Man Who Paints With His Penis
Rommel & Badgi | Manila Street Child’s Best Friend is His Loyal Dog
Toms: The Complex World of Female Love in Thailand
