Herald Sun leapfrogs The Age in December news rankings
News.com.au has retained the top spot in the Nielsen online news website ranking whilst the 9News suite of websites leapfrogged the Daily Mail and the Herald Sun overtook The Age in an unusually strong December for web traffic.
December saw record spikes for the days surrounding the Sydney siege for many news sites as they carried rolling coverage, but the usual seasonal drop off saw most sites slip slightly in the overall number of unique audience.
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Yahoo7 enjoyed an audience boost with a unique audience of 2.136m, up from 1.960m in November, but Fairfax’s Melbourne masthead The Age dropped 450,000 from its unique audience to 1.872m, and was overtaken by News Corp competitor the Herald Sun.
Despite many news sites experiencing a surge in traffic with rolling coverage of the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney, both of the traditional newspaper mastheads’ websites saw a slump for the month, with Fairfax’s SMH.com.au dipping to a unique audience of 3.306m from 3.471m in November, but retaining second place, and News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph getting a unique audience of 1.674m, down from 1.716m the previous month, remaining in tenth place.
Nine’s suite of websites, which include NineMSN and 9News.com.au, saw the biggest jump in traffic for the month picking up nearly 250,000 readers for a unique audience of 2.723m. It leapfrogged stablemate the Daily Mail into fourth spot, with the British masthead dropping to 2.333m, down 180,000 on the previous month.
The Guardian also suffered a dip in audience to 1.727m from 1.9m the previous month, but ABC News got a boost to 3.042m from 2.917m.
The BBC’s clasification review has been finalised, with the site sitting in 11th place with a unique audience of 1.62m.
Alex Hayes
Break down the figures and I’ll bet you’ll find the majority of that traffic is going straight to Bolt’s blog. The actual Herald Sun homepage is hopeless.
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Nine’s “suite of websites”? Why is nine able to bundle multiple sites together to generate a bigger figure while every other news site stand – and compete – on its own.? On that basis, shouldn’t fairfax and news corp be allowed to roll all of their news sites together to generate a bigger traffic figure. Not exactly apples with apples here Neilson. other than this, news.com appears to be opening up a sizeable lead on smh – two months in a row they’ve been ahead by a big margin. If SMH isn’t cAreful, theyll be overtaken by ABC
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Mitchell Fairfax is in decline, both the web sites and the print editions. While the group once took prided in their products, now they just struggle to meet deadlines. Things at News might not be much better, but they do have a much strong editorial direction, even if it does lean towards the mad right.
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