News

SMH retains top spot in news rankings, while the Daily Mail closes in on ABC’s fourth spot

The SMH.com.au has retained its top spot in the Nielsen news rankings for the month of September with a unique audience of 3.6m, narrowly ahead of news.com.au which had 3.56m.

While the SMH leads for the second month in a row, News Corp’s news.com.au leads its rival in time spent person with 1 hr and 30 minutes compared with 1hr and seven minutes for the Fairfax’s NSW based title. The Melbourne based online masthead, The Age’s website beats both titles, with a time spent on site of nearly double most of websites in the top ten Nielsen rankings of 1hr and 48 minutes.

NielsenMeanwhile the news rankings largely stayed the same with Yahoo!7 the major change dropping from sixth to eighth and the Daily Mail Australia rapidly closing in on the ABC’s long held fourth position in the rankings with the UK tabloid, which announced its Australian arrival almost a year ago, with 2.508m readers compared with 2.518m for the public broadcaster.

The news comes just a day after the ABC’s Media Watch highlighted multiple instances of the Daily Mail taking work from other websites without always attributing the work. Media Watch reported last night that two journalists had been put under ‘urgent review’ and that one had resigned.

Social viral content website Buzzfeed also had an audience of 1.576m a result which would have placed them a tenth place but Nielsen has consistently refused to classify them as standard news website, meaning they do not appear on the rankings. The decision means the BBC, which has also just announced a major Australian push, was at the bottom of the top ten.

Outside the top ten news websites we the Daily Telegraph which had 1.447m, fellow News Corp titles The Courier Mail and The Australian had 1.419m and 1.240m respectively.

University funded news website The Conversation had an audience of 368,000, up 15 per cent on last month.

Industry body the IAB announced yesterday that Nielsen had been awarded the contract for online audience measurement for a further three years.

Nic Christensen

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