7news.com.au debuts in fifth place on Nielsen June DCR
7news.com.au has made its debut on the Nielsen Digital Content Ratings for June 2019, landing in fifth place with 5.463m unique viewers for the month.
In October 2018, Seven’s former chief digital officer, Clive Dickens, said the platform would be number one within six months of launch. The platform officially launched in April, and Dickens departed Seven for Optus earlier this year.
The appearance comes after the company has finalised its split from Yahoo, which had previously seen the two listed together as Yahoo7.
Yahoo grew its audience to 3.262m from last month’s 3.139m, but due to the new inclusion it was bumped from ninth to tenth position. The Daily Telegraph dropped out of the top 10 entirely because of 7news.com.au’s presence.
The unique audience figure is a 20% growth from when Yahoo and Seven were combined, which Seven West Media digital sales director James Bayes believes shows the success it can achieve when it holds control of its own brands.
“We are thrilled with the momentum behind 7news.com.au which has rapidly established itself as a major force in market,” said Bayes.
“We’re particularly delighted by the success we’re seeing in attracting younger readers through our video led approach to news, introducing a whole new audience to 7News and complementing our dominant position on broadcast.
“Now that we are in full control of our digital products, we’re better positioned than ever before to support the growth of our clients with scaled data, insights and content led solutions, all built on 7news.com.au and our other leading digital properties.”
Nielsen DCR June 2019 (Click to enlarge)
News.com.au, which broke 10m unique viewers for the first time in the May DCR, had a 3% drop but managed to hold above the benchmark with 10.034m unique viewers in June 2019.
ABC, however, saw a significant drop after also breaking the 10m barrier in May, falling back to 8.824m for June. It’s likely the peak was caused by the site’s election coverage, which was the reason it managed to topple news.com.au in 2016.
Nine.com.au and smh.com.au held third and fourth spot respectively, as they had in May. They only experienced small changes from the prior month.
There was also a drop for the Guardian which fell 16%, but it also had a 24% rise in May, likely caused by the election. For June 2019, the site had 4.469m unique viewers. The Daily Mail also fell, dropping 21% to 4.318m, while Australian Community Media Network, which was formerly Fairfax Digital Regional Network, gained 2% for 3.741m.
In the smaller publishers, Vice grew 13% to 1.089m unique viewers, Pedestrian, which doesn’t yet include its Allure properties, dropped 3% after a lofty gain last month, landing on 1.011m and Junkee held 913,645, a 9% drop from May 2019. Urban List pulled 1.48m unique viewers.
7News may well have ranked fifth on Unique Audience but have a look at its Time Spent Per Person across the month.
It was a shade under 4 1/2 minutes and only just pipped Australian Community Media Network.
The Sessions per Person across the month were in the bottom of the range at 4.1.
This indicates a lot of people trialling 7News but not for long and not often, but it is still early days.
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