Mumbrella, Campaign Brief & Best Ads see July increases, as B&T and AdNews stay unaudited
All of the marketing trade press titles that have audited online numbers recorded increases in audience during July, according to data from Nielsen MarketIntelligence.
Campaign Brief’s average daily domestic unique browsers rose from 1,713 to 1,839 – up 7.4% – while Mumbrella’s daily domestic UBs rose from 5,594 to 6,107 – up 9.2%.
The number of monthly UBs, which is a less reliable metric because of potential double counting of users at home and work, also rose for both titles.
Best Ads On TV also went up – from 582 average daily UBs to 631.
AdNews and B&T have so far not responded to an invitation to be audited by the Audit Bureaux of Australia which already assesses their print numbers.
But the last time the two trade titles made a public claim of online numbers, AdNews said that it has 25,694 monthly UBs. However this number would also include overseas numbers which are excluded in the audited Nielsen data above. B&T has previously claimed UB monthly numbers of 71,481 which again would also include overseas traffic.
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Still think this is a big and frustrating issue … so many sites (including some of our loose competitive set) not only refuse to be audited, they refuse to be measured by a third party.
so for a marketer (and those working on her/his behalf) this raises a lot of questions …
– can you trust the numbers?
– are you paying for your ads being seen by people outside of AU
– is auto refresh code being used
Can someone explain to me why they audit their print titles but not their websites?
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Web stats aside- I’d love to know what the yearly $$ turnover is of Mumbrella vs AdNews vs B&T etc
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View Mumbrella’s latest Audit Certificate (powered by Nielsen) here: http://bit.ly/9tS41W
Can’t comment on those who decline to participate, but on the positive side …
congrats to Austereo and Independent Digital Media for recently passing the ABA audit. Support is still growing as more publishers signup to be ABA audited in order to prove that their figures are not in error or have not been manipulated. Roughly speaking, only 10% of sites pass the audit without a correction so advertisers should think about this if they are still accepting home-cooked figures.
Find out who has numbers you can trust: http://bit.ly/aWrp4N
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@ANON333 – Interesting that you say you wonder what the ad revenue is. It’s the old issue of monetising sites – just as Mr Murdoch.
I suspect Tim turns down a lot of advertising – would Mumbrella users be happy to recieve more ads in their inbox? I suspect not. I’ve found in the past, that where ‘community’ sites are open and honest about accepting more ads (eg “I know you might not like advertising, but by having it, it supports the site and lets me work full time on getting good content”) then people warm to the idea.
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Sorry to say this but as a media buyer, I have had pretty good success rates on both B&T and AdNews sites. Really don’t understand why you keep complaining- everyone knows that AdNews have just set up a new site and that B&T are in the middle of making changes. That probably answers your question Bozo the Frown.
By the way, you should be careful what you report on your competitors Tim! I have been told that UBs for AdNews have been nearly DOUBLE what you are indicating here for the last three months or so- where do you get your info. from??
Like seeing healthy competition, don’t like it when you just bash everyone about all the time.
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Hi Angela,
Thanks for your thoughts. Just a couple of questions from me. Last time somebody commented from what appears to be your IP address, they were called “Pamela”. https://mumbrella.com.au/mumbrella-and-campaign-brief-both-see-growth-in-audited-online-traffic-27218
Funnily enough, that was on the same topic and Pamela also seemed to have information on an increase that AdNews is claiming on its audience. I see you’re claiming them to be up nearly 100%. Last time round Pamela was saying it was up 175%. Would you mind having a chat to her and finding out which figure is correct?
To answer your question, the information came when AdNews released its Google Analytics to Amnesia when they wrote about it on their blog – the link’s above. I’d be delighted to share more recent numbers if they were made available.
It can all be very confusing for the market when advocates for AdNews make anonymous comments, particularly when they are contradictory claims.
Happily, there’s a solution – audited numbers. It’s a level playing field then. “As a media buyer” I’m sure you’re in favour of that sort of transparency. Aren’t you?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Angela,
Nope, that doesn’t answer my question at all.
Why on earth would the fact that Ad news redesigned their website several months ago stop them from getting their numbers audited? If advertisers are paying to appear they should know exactly what they are (or are not) paying for.
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I’m a bit confused – does Angela work for AdNews or not?
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Interesting article related to this topic:
http://anthillonline.com/how-t.....ipped-off/
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I need to start putting more aussie content on my site 🙂 Lucky Bannerblog is big in the USA and UK
Hey Tim, does the auditing also give you time on site and also where the referrals are coming from? As that is also a good indicator or the quality of audience. Ie a lot from search on random topics vs direct bookmarks or news feeds?
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Hi Ash,
Nielsen does give an average engagement time on page/ site. From time to time Alexx at the ABA writes an overview of the sector and that’s one of the factors that he sometimes looks at. As to referral origins, I don’t think Nielsen includes that – it would indeed be quite interestign to see though.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Site Census would show you referrer origin … but not an external tool like MI … that info doesn’t really need to out in public and I’d imagine many sites would not want their referrer traffic and origin known.
Thanks Tim and Ben. referrer traffic I wasnt thinking it was public it’s just that does give an indication to the type of traffic. Ive posted stuff previous like this one on Digital Puppies http://www.bannerblog.com.au/n.....uppies.php and now I get traffic from people searching for puppies. Check the comments 🙂 Useless traffic. I imagine if you post stuff about masterchef or other hot topics you get much more random searches like this.
As for session times. this should be public yeah? I have one site http://sleevage.com that gets just over a minute average time (1.5 pages av) where at Bannerblog is over 4 min (6 pages av). The quality of visitor is much higher on BB, although traffic is less.
Im summary (im rambling now) The raw stats dont let you see the quality. Not doubting Mumbrella at all just saying that raw figures alone don’t tell the full story.
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You’re right Ash … raw stats will just give you volume … not how the user got to site, whether they stayed, returned etc etc
probably why you see a fair bit of volatility on some sites around PIs and UBs from month to month with no obvious explanation. Alexx Cass would be able to chime in with some more info on this issue.
“If it bleeds, it leads” goes the old moniker. Good to know Mumbrella is big, but so is Perez Hilton, so let’s not confuse popularity with quality. Let’s thank the insecure industries this blog serves.
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Tim can this chart be updated with page views and average time on site for the next round? It’d give a clearer picture of how the sites are performing.
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Hi Ash,
Briefly, for July, Nielsen says the average page duration for Mumbrella was 1.36, and for Campaign Brief was 1.35. The average session duration was 3.18 and 2.58.
But as I say, Alexx Cass at the ABA sometimes offers a wider piece of analysis on this within the context of the audited business titles generally. If memory serves, in a previous comment Alexx has offered to make this a regular piece if Adnews and B&T agree to be audited too.)
(A further health warning – Nielsen numbers on times on non-audited sites have to be treated with some caution, as auto-refresh can play havoc with the data).
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
thanks Tim
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Everyone’s comments are right, I have seen in the data that traffic quality varies greatly, site-to-site, month-to-month. The data for referring pages and viewed pages is collected but is generally not made public so it’s hard for media-buyers to evaluate this for themselves.
So maybe the industry should support an opt-in ‘website quality audit’ independently evaluating content quality, audience quality, enagagement, loyalty, ad clutter etc.
You get 5 STARS if you have a loyal engaged community of high-income early adopters reading articles for 10 mins with one ad per page compared to a 1 STAR site with mostly international traffic coming from Digg to an Australian Farmers website to look at Lara Bingle pictures someone has posted in the forums, staying for 10 secs and never coming back again.
I’m kidding of course, because evaluating ‘quality’ can be subjective and I doubt any publisher would open themselves up to this level of scrutiny. But in the future, it will be interesting to see how far the industry goes in standardising other metrics to help buyers evaluate all the niche sites in the market.
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