On a weekend that saw the beginning of the Olympics and the unfolding of a major police scandal, it will likely come as a surprise to most that almost as many Brits were reading about bananas as they were these two topics.
Yet that’s what happened, with a story about Tesco advising people they can freeze bananas scooping up close to 5% of total page views from Taboola’s network of UK media publishers over a 24-hour period. In comparison, the Olympics pulled in about 15% and the police scandal around 6%.
The interest in bananas began after a story headlined “Tesco shares warning to anyone buying bananas” was published on Sunday on the website of The Express. The story linked out to an article on the supermarket giant’s website, which was titled “Things you didn’t know you could freeze”.
Bananas appeared in the number 4 spot on a list of 12 items, which also included yoghurt, wine and cooked rice.
Readership trend data from Taboola revealed that after the story was shared across a wide variety of titles owned by Reach, which is also the owner of The Express, page views for ‘bananas’ and ‘Tesco’ climbed to more than 700,000 over a 24-hour period.
To put this into context, on the previous Sunday (July 21), Tesco attracted just 21,000 page views and bananas 35,000. This week’s 700,000 figure was similar to the number of page views for ‘Harry’ and ‘Meghan’ combined over the same period.
Dan Ginns, UK country manager for Taboola, said: “Taboola’s data shows the power of editorial coverage to retail brands, especially when publishers that own multiple outlets are involved. A non-controversial piece of information with no obvious news hook saw Tesco pick up more than half a million page views after it was covered by one reporter and shared across a wider publishing network.”
