Interested readers may view a dynamically sortable table of the complete list of top 1000 most visited sites on the web which also has APV added (Warning: on slow computers it may take a while to load or crash your browser since it’s a long list that requires Javascript processing).

I used it to gather the following data for sites in the News category.

News & Current Events

This category includes sites with an online and television presence, covering current and breaking news.

• BBC (#43) with 45 million UU and 56 APV, the highest in the overall News category
• ifeng.com (#55) in Chinese/Mandarin
• CNN (#64) with 34 million UU and 38 APV
• Digg (#252) is also impressive given that its a community driven news aggregator that runs automatically
• FoxNews (#279) with 11 million UU and 8 APV

Newspapers

This category includes the traditional print newspapers complemented by an online presence

• NYTimes (#83) takes the top spot with 26 million UU and 23 APV
• Yomiuri (#213) with 20 APV
• Daily Mail (#236) with 22 APV
• WSJ (#277) with 15 APV
• Mainichi (#287) with 7 APV
• Guardian (#310) with 16 APV

Business News

• CE.CN (#500) with 7.4 million UU and 5 APV giving it 34 million monthly PV
• Forbes (#633) with 6.1 million UU and 18 APV giving it 110 million monthly PV

Local News

This category includes online news sites which focus on national coverage

• iG.com.br (#477) out of Brazil
• zjol.com.cn (#746) out of China

Social Networks

Of the top 1000 sites, the ones with the highest APV are comprised primarily of social networking sites along with a few classifieds and shopping sites. This makes sense because people spend a lot of time on social networking sites viewing a lot of pages.

Page Views

Facebook is the grand daddy of all websites. Not only does it have the highest number of UU at 540 million, its PV count gets even more impressive with an APV count of 1056. Facebook gets a total of 570 billion page views per month which is more than all the next 30 websites combined! Yahoo web portal is a paltry second with 70 billion page views from it’s 490 million unique users.

Building large scale systems like The Express Tribune news portal and turning it around in 6 months requires a team of determined masochists and some really quick thinking. One has to think about scalability, performance, security, architecture and pliability of the product. One also has to think about usability, information architecture and layouts. About user interactivity, community engagement and publication workflows. Integration with television and print and a coherent new media strategy.

But it’s here and it’s far from over. Going in, I was confident that we would easily come out ahead of the competition (whom I have written about here and here) but I never thought I would have so much fun doing it.

The Express Tribune website uses some existing platforms and our developer toolkit is quite powerful, but to get to where we wanted to go, we got neck deep in every aspect of the system.

Beyond being just a pretty website, it has some behind the scenes features where it really shines out. This is where the competition has a lot of catching up to do. For example, assigning headlines and stories to sections or updating the page layout happens directly from the section itself, rather than going in to some specialized administrative screen. The image management and carousels are first class features and not just an after thought. The News in Pictures and slide shows can be done in under 5 minutes. The pages load blazingly fast, because we optimized not only the caching mechanisms but also the web server, database server, application server and even the operating system.

The user interface follows some hard principles. For example, the comment preview feature is painstakingly simple and dynamic so users know exactly how their words will appear. The submit button is below the comment preview by design, so the user is forced to preview on his way to the submit button. The design follows a horizontal rhythm using grid-based layouts. The weather widget updates the weather without having to refresh the page and on the back end we do some very specific caching so we can handle thousands of users, yet provide the latest weather updates or auto updating stock charts. The alerts ticker is directly linked to the Express 24/7 television station which requires some trickery on the part of both, the television platform as well as the web platform.

The interesting bits about strategy are something I cannot talk about other than to say that if the website works well for you and you find yourself interacting more and more, it’s because we put the user first. And in the short and long term both, our strategy will allow us to surpass the competition and out-pace them so we maintain the lead.

With internet penetration growing the way it is, I have no doubt that The Express Tribune portal will provide common ground for a lot of avid readers and have interesting side effects.

The website is a big hoarding with no less than 20 advertisements on the front page while at the same time carries less than 100 words of actual news. And it looks really ugly.

This is what happens when you just don’t care about the readers. This is what happens when designers develop, developers design, business units dictate the roadmap and talent in general lacks. This is also what happens when you just don’t understand interaction design, information architecture, usability or have been oblivious to the paradigm shifts in online advertising and technological trends. This screen capture of the Jang News website clearly highlights all this.

The actual news content is highlighted in green boxes while the rest of the page is mostly advertisements. All ad slots highlighted in red are available for sale while unsold ad space is used for in-house products. The advertising tariffs section of the website indicates the type of ads available for sale on Jang News Online which includes video and expandable ads at a premium. The annoying expandable ads block access to the news until readers close them (shown in the screen capture) while video ads block the rest of the page because they take so long to load (Pakistan has very low broadband penetration in any case).

Jang News Online gets a considerable amount of traffic because the Jang News Group has entrenched itself as the face of news over the past 70 years that it has been around–a time during which it enjoyed little or no competition which helps explain their complacency.

Now, I am not even sure why an advertiser would want to publish one ad amongst 20 when it’s well known that users develop banner blindness and moreover the website’s ad space is extremely diluted and the screen interface is so cluttered.

The page reminds me of the days popup ads ran rampant until readers expressed rage and all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, et al) reacted by featuring popup blockers to put an end to it all. Unfortunately, in Jang’s case it’s not easy to block the spam. The website’s front page is practically an online hoarding which seems to take it’s cue from the million dollar homepage (whose sole purpose is to show advertisements) rather than a news site. One may easily pass this off as spam in its current state.