GMANews.TV awarded for 'high user engagement'

GMANews.TV was recognized on Wednesday for its "audience reach and high user engagement" in winning DigitalFilipino.com's annual web award in the Television category. GMANews.TV is the official web site of GMA News and Public Affairs. Janette Toral, founder of DigitalFilipino.com, also cited GMANews.TV's "search engine visibility."

GMANews.TV's Howie Severino (center) receives the 2010 DigitalFilipino.com web award on behalf of the site from award co-organizers Bernardo J.B. Mitra Sr. and Janette Toral.

"The news content of the site has numerous mentions in search engines (Google News and Yahoo Site Explorer) and blogs (Google blog mentions)," Toral said via email. DigitalFilipino.com is a leading e-commerce research site in the Philippines that scans hundreds of web sites in selecting its annual award winners. The site was founded in 1999. Among the other winners this year were ph.yahoo.com for the Portal category, PEP.ph for Entertainment, and pagasa.dost.gov.ph for Government. This year's awards were sponsored by Search Profile Index. Toral explained that the awards judges were also looking for "stickiness," or the tendency of users to spend time on the site, and not just the usual web traffic metric of page views. "Making it easy for users to post comments is a big factor in this," she said. Finally, the judges noted GMANews.TV's technical back-end, or code structure, "making it a fast-loading web site," Toral said. "This is an honor especially since it comes from a group that really knows what works on the web," said GMANews.TV's editor-in-chief Howie Severino, who received the award on behalf of the news site. "It's supremely gratifying for our staff that works long hours to put out a quality product that netizens can use and appreciate." - TJD, GMANews.TV