Fires lead to leap in news website hits
The bushfires raging in three states has seen a jump in hits on news websites with NineMSN alone recording a 20 per cent jump in traffic to its news and weather sections over the past three days.
Fairfax also reported rises in The Age and SMH sites – the latter of which ran a 12 hour rolling blog by five writers yesterday. It was the most read story of the day.
But it was NineMSN which claims top honours as having the most page views yesterday, according to Nielsen Site Census data.
A spokeswoman said the biggest increase was on its weather site, which was 50 per cent up on Monday and 100 per cent up yesterday as people tracked the heatwave affecting much of the country.
News.com.au saw a UB rise of 37 per cent to its news and information section on Monday and Tuesday, and a 55 per cent rise in UB’s over the past three days.
News Limited’s east coast metro sites – thetelegraph.com.au, heraldsun.com.au and couriermail.com.au – also saw increases in traffic over the last few days.
“In addition, the News Limited online news network ran two rolling stories updated regularly throughout the day – one providing the latest news on the bushfire emergency and the other providing heatwave weather update,” a spokeswoman said.
However, magazine sales may take a hit with the fires affecting distribution routes – on top of people in affected areas being more concerned with protecting homes than reading gossip and lifestyle.
I’m wondering how long those readers stayed on NineMSN.
The site gets a lot of artificial visitors from people logging out of Hotmail who get automatically directed there.
User ID not verified.
Another thing to consider is the difference between UBs (Unique Browsers) versus UVs (Unique Visitors). UBs doesn’t for example take into account a use case where the same person might have visited multiple times in the same day — I know I did as I waited to see when the heat would end!!
User ID not verified.
Another thing to consider is the difference between UBs (Unique Browsers) versus UVs (Unique Visitors). UBs doesn’t for example take into account a use case where the same person might have visited multiple times in the same day — I know I did as I waited to see when the heat would end!!
User ID not verified.
Re comment made by “Doubter” – ninemsn does not calculate traffic that comes via Hotmail. Their figures are calculated direct from articles and homepage visits.
User ID not verified.