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CTVNews.ca's top 10 most-read stories of 2015

Jesse Tahirali and Phil Hahn CTVNews.ca
Published Wednesday, December 23, 2015 4:05PM EST Last Updated Wednesday, December 23, 2015 4:06PM EST

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TOP 10 MOST-READ STORIES ON MOBILE

A story highlighting a melanoma awareness video that went viral was, by quite a margin, the most-read on CTVNews.ca in 2015.

The video begins with several adults addressing their 16-year-old selves before issuing a cheeky appeal like “please don’t get that perm …” and to please not watch the new Star Wars movies that are so bad “they ruin everything.” They then reveal themselves to be melanoma survivors, showing their younger selves the scars on their bodies, when they were diagnosed with melanoma, and why. It’s a well written, smartly-produced video that doesn’t pander, but informs in an engaging way.

The thing is, we posted that story in May, 2011. The video by the David Cornfield Melanoma Fund is four years old. So why, in 2015, did that story get triple the views of our second-most read story on CTVNews.ca?

You may have already guessed: the power of Facebook. May is Skin Cancer Awareness Month, so a reader found our story in May in our archives, shared the link on Facebook, and it took off from there -- resulting in over 1.6 million Facebook referrals and 2.2 million views overall.

Our second most-read story was about new traffic laws introduced in September, aimed at making driving safer in Ontario. Following that was a tragic story out of Blairmore, Alberta, where a man was charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of a toddler and her father.

As we did last year, we’ve given you two top-10 lists of stories viewed on desktop versus those viewed on mobile (which could be either a phone or a tablet). Why the two lists? While they share four stories in common, they each contain six that are platform unique, telling us that certain stories perform better depending on what platform they’re being viewed. Perhaps different audiences visit us on mobile than those who primarily use desktops or laptops. Or mobile users are more prone to sharing. This makes sense for the melanoma example if you consider Facebook has 1.39 billion mobile monthly active users (stats as of November 2015) and that nearly half of them only use Facebook on mobile devices.

On desktop, you’ll see below that the top story was about a Roll Up the Rim contest winner who missed the fine print and was denied her prize. That one did pretty well on mobile as well, placing fourth on that list.

When it comes to political stories, notice that one about Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau cracked number three on the desktop list, with her prime minister husband nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, an explainer on the new Universal Child Care Benefit was number nine on mobile.

If you’re wondering where all the federal election stories are, given October’s historic result, we looked into it and found that while no individual article about the results made it into the top 10, stories about the election, CTV/Nanos poll results and post-election stories did well collectively. Expand the list to a top-100 and these stories got over 1.6 million hits on mobile, and 1.2 million hits on desktop.

In this business we’ve been hearing for a few years now about the explosion of mobile and how it’s eclipsing desktop. The proof is in the numbers, and if you compare the numbers by platform in this year’s lists to 2014’s, you’ll see they’ve flipped.