One month after The Punch’s launch, Crikey still leads
Despite cross promotion from its News Ltd family, The Punch has attracted only a moderate audience in its first month of operations, data suggests.
According to online audience measurement service Alexa, The Punch has so far failed to overhaul its biggest commentry rival Crikey. However, it appears to have already moved past New Matilda.
With the exception of ABC Unleashed and New Matilda, large scale general interest sites aggregating comment and opinion have been a late arrival in Australia.
However, the last quarter has seen Crikey – best known as a daily subscription email newsletter – relaunch its own website as a comment and opinion aggregator; the start of The Punch, and the announcement that Fairfax plans to launch the National Times.
Alexa is useful for a general impression of surfing habits only, because its is based on a relatively small number of users who instal its toolbar. It also searches by domain only, so for instance the audience for ABC Unleashed as opposed to abc.net.au cannot easily be viewed.
But what the figures do show is that since it launched on June 1, The Punch – edited by former Daily Telegraph editor David Penberthy – appears to have seen the biggest interest on the day it launched, when its audience was similar to Crikey’s and immediately moved ahead of five-year-old New Matilda.
Since then, Crikey has stayed consistently on top, with both sites showing a surge late last week coinciding with the death of Michael Jackson.
Globally, the best known comment and debate aggregation sites include The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast in the US and The Guardian’s Comment is Free site based in the UK. US-focused The Inquisitr, headed by the Aussie Duncan Riley, is also making inroads.
Update: Ben Shepherd, digitsal director of media agency Maxus has been crunching his own numbers using the more detailed Nielsen data. He reveals:
The Punch is getting around 9,500 people a day.
This month (to 27/6/09) they have a total of 187,192 users. These users have viewed on average around 3.15 pages each.
Average session duration is 3 minutes, 59 seconds. A user returns on average .6 times.
So lets look at the important bits
– Daily traffic. Not great
– Page views. Flat. By my math they’re generating around 30,000 page views a day which probably equates to around $500-$800 a day in ad revenue at a reasonable sell through.
– Engagement. Shaky start. Most users aren’t returning. Time spent is under 4 minutes and pages viewed per person is around 3 which suggests users are barely scratching the surface when it comes to reading the content.
He explores the issues behind this more fully on his blog.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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These results are interesting – I guess time will tell if it can get any more traction. I really like it because it is like a virtual soapbox. Get the e-newsletter and read about four pieces a day. If the topics continue to vary from Tracey Spicer’s take on the apostrophe to climate change and the Iran election, I’ll keep reading.
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thepunch is to crikey what mumbrella is to thepunch traffic wise at the moment.
thepunch has that big news.com.au engine pushing about half of it’s traffic and they can turn that up and down if they have to and could push pass crikey if they made the effort whatever thats worth.
Its currently like some Op-ed meets morning radio experiment. They will have to up the density huffpo style if they really want to create a destination but that’s probably not its purpose. Defence and roadblocks is the big media companies way.
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Hi Jerry S,
Thanks for your comment.
It’s a very fair point that there will be a few tricks in the News Ltd armoury yet, to send them traffic.
But on your first point, I’d argue that comparing Mumbrella to The Punch isn’t sensible because we’re targetting different audiences – effectively Mumbrella is mainly aimed at those working within the media and marketing industry (B2B if you will) and The Punch is aimed at the general public.
That’s not to mention that News Ltd’s investment in creating content for The Punch (editorial team of four or five including @colgo and @penbo sized salaries) may be a tad larger than what we’re spending on Mumbrella (mainly just me).
However, if you were to twist my arm, Alexa points to us being about neck-and-neck for traffic. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/.....nch.com.au
By the way, my guess is that in reality The Punch is ahead of us, and Alexa’s not fully picking it up.
Cheers,
Tim
Alexa is not a great comparison site. To get an idea about unique visitors, check out…
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....ch.com.au/
Both sites are a bit scrappy but fun to watch. 🙂
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Hi James,
I agree about Alexa, but I’m not sure the site you point to is much better.
Obviosuly I’m only in a position to know about Mumbrella. Sitecompete says we’ve got 5,800 uniques a month. Google Analytics tells me I’ve got well over ten times that number. That makes me doubt I can trust it on other relatively low traffic sites.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
That was the point. For the past decade the big local media companies have approached their online initiatives largely as defensive strategy. Their success is measured by their success in stopping other sites becoming successful.
thepunch is a waste of everyone’s time in its current format. Crikey lost its clear focus with the revamp and is still a little lost and searching for cohesion as well.
Still think huffpo is a better format for News. It’s like an inverted imagined version of Murdoch’s Sun with arianna as Murdoch, the page three girls replaced by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Alex Baldwin and then a pastiche of borrowings thrown against the wall. Amazing she gets away with it but there you go. The Daily Beast is vanity publishing at it’s finest.
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Well kids, I think someone has to man up and unload their internal analytics figures. Or everyone provides a trusted third party with a guest login so they can see the topline figures.
The data’s not *that* sensitive. Would you do it, Tim?
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Hi Tim,
I’m quite tempted to (we have published screengrabs of our analytics previously).
I’m still trying to work out whether it’s worth jumping on board the ABA’s new audit system which is designed for smaller publishers. I will if the others in our space (AdNews, B&T, Campaign Brief, Marketing Mag etc will…)
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella