Monday, 3 Octorber
The Sun is to close its online community and forum service, My Sun, ahead of changes to thesun.co.uk.
The title is closing the five-year-old community, transferring user accounts over to the main Sun website, according to a post by Daniel Jackson, My Sun community manager.
After today, My Sun forums, SunVote, user blogs, photo galleries and private messaging systems will no longer be available. It launched in 2006 to be a platform for readers to chat and debate Sun stories.
The Sun has also added a new education channel – Hold Ye Front Page – to thesun.co.uk today. The campaign site, which draws content from historical Sun front pages, features articles explaining the background to each story.
According to a spokesman for The Sun, it has been in development for “quite some time”. It’s intended as an education tool, marking the culmination of The Sun’s Get Britain Learning campaign.
Speculation that News International is exploring the idea of extending The Sun to a seven-day proposition since the closure of the News of the World in July has been rife. News of the World’s women’s magazine, Fabulous, was retained and has its own online channel within thesun.co.uk.
In other online activity, The Sun is looking to develop digital products and services around the brand as part of long-term plans to develop its Sun Perks loyalty scheme. The News International-owned tabloid relaunched Sun Perks earlier this month to focus on a 10-week Christmas loyalty programme, with a campaign running across TV, online, radio and press, fronted by a turkey character, Perky.
According to Rob Painter, marketing director for The Sun, the long-term aim is to build The Sun’s own products and services into a loyalty programme, rather than just trading media value or vouchers with commercial partners.
Meanwhile, The Sun’s fantasy football game, Dream Team, topped 1m players in August, following its switch to a freemium model last month to boost online participation.
Updated 03.10.11
The Sun is to introduce social networking functionality – My View – across thesun.co.uk, following the closure of My Sun last Friday.
The My Sun community, which The Sun claims had around 250,000 members last month, has been brought into the main site.
Thesun.co.uk will now feature a commenting platform from an unnamed provider, with faster registration for users, as well as a single Facebook and Twitter sign-in using social media plug-ins. The aim is to make it easier to share across social media platforms, according to a spokesman for The Sun.
Across social media platforms, The Sun has just 56,352 Facebook fans, while on Twitter The Sun has local profiles, such as The Sun Portsmouth and The Sun West Ham.
The Sun has denied that there will be any further changes to thesun.co.uk, saying that the closure of My Sun is a “community replatforming project”.
