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.
Overall News Corp’s News.com.au retained its top position while the ABC and SMH also saw lifts in their audience. The public broadcaster’s audience went from 2.243m to 2.695, a rise of 20 per cent, and the SMH has a 10 per cent rise in unique audience with 2.917m up from 2.647, in August.
New digital start up The Guardian had a unique Australia audience of 1.214m across all its websites, according to Nielsen. This number is down on last month where it the audience measurement company said it had an audience of 1.306m.
Nielsen’s analysis also showed that the major political parties upped their advertising spending significantly during the last week of campaigning in terms of broader advertising investment with Palmer United Party outspending the Australian Labour Party in the final week of the campaign.
According to the company, Palmer spent more than $2.7m in the final week of the campaign compared with just over $1.5 for Labor. The Liberals spent more than $4m in the final week of the election campaign.
Update:
A spokesman for The Guardian said the fall in the UK newspaper’s Australian audience was the result of the newspaper migrating its various urls to the one global theguardian.com domain.
“Since we moved to our new domain, traffic to our site has held up well compared to our forecasts,”said the spokesman. “However, the project was always going to be a complex undertaking, given the size of our site and our global audience, and as a result we have noted a dip in our traffic numbers in some markets, including the UK and Australia.”
“This dip was expected, and we continue to work hard to make improvements to ensure that the short-term impact is kept to a minimum,” he said.
Nic Christensen
still too many reading the telegraph.
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Interesting that The Guardian’s audience fell but even by those numbers should it not displace The Australian in your table?
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Anonymous, given that 1.287m (The Australian – Sept) is a bigger number than 1.214m (Guardian – Sept) – no.
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