Online

Â鶹Éç Scotland’s websites, in 2008/09, showed an increase across the board in online reach, accessed by three million unique users per week in the first quarter of 2009 (up from 2008’s weekly average of 2.9 million).

News, sport and learning continue to dominate the online statistics, supported by our core sites – Radio Scotland, Scotland’s Music, Scotland’s History, Scotland Outdoors, Scotland’s six ‘Local’ sites, River City and the Scotland homepage itself.

Key highlights across the year included the perennially strong performance for Bitesize Standard Grade and Higher, which attracted over six million visits by 500,000 unique users during the exam period of April and May. In mid-July, T in the Park built on the multiplatform success from 2007, delivering a wide variety of content across television, radio, ‘red button’ and online. The website attracted 1.3 million page views by nearly 250,000 users over the weekend of the festival and during the weeks that followed.

The launch of the football season in August brought audiences in their droves to Scotland’s Sport sites: the twin-header of on-demand game-by-game SPL highlights alongside the innovative Predictor game attracted 2.6 million unique users in August alone.

September saw the launch of Â鶹Éç Scotland’s largest online archive project to date: the Learning Zone Scotland broadband clips library. It provides over 500 on-demand clips from the wide archive of Scottish Schools programmes across a huge variety of subject areas. New clips are added daily.

November was dominated by the launch of the Scotland’s History year-long campaign, alongside the transmission of A History of Scotland on Â鶹Éç One Scotland. The accompanying site will be the online home of all Â鶹Éç Scotland history content, containing a wealth of embedded video and audio, interactive maps and timelines, and a lively debate forum. The site also contained a first for Â鶹Éç Scotland: the innovative Lostpenny augmented reality game, merging fiction, social interaction and research and historical investigation. Over the year, Scotland’s History online received 1.64 million page views by over 500,000 unique users.

To celebrate the 250th anniversary of his birth, a Burns online site launched in January, offering exclusive recordings of all his poems by Sean Connery, Robert Carlyle, Robbie Coltrane, Tony Blair and HRH the Prince of Wales, amongst others. Coverage on Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland, Â鶹Éç Radio 4 and prominent positioning on the main Â鶹Éç homepage helped the site archive 500,000 page views by 140,000 unique users in January alone.

In February an article on the Scotland Outdoors site, exploring the appearance of a mysterious alien jelly, was picked up across the Â鶹Éç, becoming the second most ‘clickedthrough’ promo on the main Â鶹Éç website to date – 340,000 people so far have visited this single page, 23% of all traffic to the Outdoors website.

In March, a micro-site supporting Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland’s M8 season with additional video and photo content, proved so popular that it outperformed the main Â鶹Éç Radio Scotland site.

Across the year, blogs from political correspondent Brian Taylor, presenters Bryan Burnett and Graham Stewart, Head of Radio Scotland Jeff Zycinski and new Learning Officer Claire McCallum helped to build links with communities across Scotland. We are better and more agile than ever before in supporting live events, this year including the Edinburgh Festival, Proms in the Park, The National Mod and Celtic Connections. Scotland’s stable of podcasts continued to show healthy growth, with three added during the year – Scottish Business, Scotland’s Gardens and Completely Burns, which offers the audience twice weekly downloads of Burns’ works.

Â鶹Éç Vision multi-platform commissions included a new game for Lazytown Extra, content to support the new series of Nina and the Neurons and innovative application developments via Project Prototype in partnership with the University of Abertay.