While news.com.au retained its position as leading news and current affairs website for the month of July, ABC News websites managed to overtake nine.com.au, with a unique audience of 4.651m – up 3% from last month.
In June, the gap between Nine and News started to close, however July saw Nine.com.au fall 4%, from 4.682m to 4.499m, with ABC bumping the website into third place.
Nine.com.au had maintained its position in second since the May digital rankings.
In the latest Nielsen digital news rankings, news.com.au climbed 11%, with its unique audience well ahead of competitors, at 5.905m.
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Smh.com.au maintained its place in fourth, despite gaining 12% in the latest Nielsen rankings, with its unique audience reaching 4.197m.
Daily Mail Australia retained its position in fifth place, with an audience of 3.069m.
The Guardian, Yahoo 7 News, and The Daily Telegraph all saw growth, reporting unique audiences of 2.823m (4%), 2.674m (4%) and 2.286m (5%) respectively.
BBC plateaued with a unique audience of 2.340m, and Herald Sun fell 2% to 2.254m.
Outside of the top 10, Mamamia fell 20%, with a unique audience of 827,000 and Mashable fell 45%, to 175,000.
The New Daily had a unique audience of 1m, falling 15% month on month.
Buzzfeed climbed 6%, with a unique audience of 1.6m, The Courier Mail climbed 3%, to 1.7m, and The Huffington Post (HuffPo) grew 31% to 2.1m.
The Australian also saw significant growth, up 20% to 1.8m.
Nielsen’s latest results are the first since digital industry body IAB Australia and Nielsen unveiled their daily digital content ratings.
The new metric provides publishers, agencies, and brands with daily digital audience data across video, audio, and text for the first time.
Nielsen said the highest unique audiences for the top 10 news entities were consistently high on Fridays, during the month of July.
Other statistics indicated news.com.au’s highest average daily unique audience peaked at 1.3m on July 21, followed by nine.com.au’s peak of 1.1m on July 25.
June Results: Gap closes between Nine and News websites, Nielsen rankings find
May results: BBC climbs 16% in Australia as international events dominate in month of May, reveals Nielsen rankings
April (amended) results: Nielsen says digital news rankings for April were wrong, and Guardian didn’t beat Daily Mail after all
March results: ABC News claims second place on Nielsen Digital News rankings as Nine.com.au falls into third place
February results: Daily Telegraph grabs ninth place in Nielsen news rankings as News.com.au builds on lead position
January results: Fairfax Media’s SMH.com.au climbs back above 4m in January as News.com.au holds top spot in news rankings