The Australian’s online traffic grows on the back of election coverage and metered move
National broadsheet The Australian saw a significant spike in traffic with its online audience rising from 967,000 to 1,287m last month, rising from 15th news website to tenth, according to new numbers from Nielsen.
The 33 per cent jump in audience for the newspaper comes amid a broader month-on-month trend which saw online visitors to news sites generally grow in the run up to the September 7 federal election, and also a loosening in The Australian’s paywall.
Last month, The Australian, owned by News Corp, introduced a “hybrid-metered” model which means non-subscribers can read up to five paywalled articles per week before they are asked to pay.
According to Nielsen Online Ratings overall traffic for all news websites spiked on the weekend of the election. “We can see significant peaks during the actual voting weekend. This indicates that many Australians take considerably more interesting election news as it happens ‐ driving new users to sites,” said Monique Perry, head of Nielsen’s media industry group.
still too many reading the telegraph.
Interesting that The Guardian’s audience fell but even by those numbers should it not displace The Australian in your table?
Anonymous, given that 1.287m (The Australian – Sept) is a bigger number than 1.214m (Guardian – Sept) – no.