Daily Mail remains top commercial news site
The Daily Mail is Australia’s favourite commercial news website, attracting a unique audience of 10.643m across the month of May.
The only news site which attracted a higher audience was the ABC, with a unique audience of 12.835m.
Daily Mail’s editor Barclay Crawford said the result was a vindication for the publication’s “hard-working, seven-days-a-week team who treat a Friday night like a Monday morning”.
“It also shows Daily Mail Australia has become the must-read for Aussies who want news, entertainment and features from around the country and the world.”
Managing director Peter Holder was similarly pleased to hold onto the second spot after last month’s climb.
Daily Mail was only beaten by the ABC
“We understand better than most that numbers and rankings will fluctuate in the news category, but the May result indisputably proves April was no flash-in-the-pan and, more importantly, confirms that we have a large and loyal audience of highly engaged news consumers.”
All websites in the top 10 experienced month-on-month falls after record-high months due to bushfire and COVID-19 coverage.
The ABC was down 6.8%, while Daily Mail was down 6.2%.
Former market leader News.com.au fell below the 10m mark to 9.568m, placing it in fourth behind Nine.com.au’s 10.198m.
Seven’s 7News rounded out the top five, after falling 12.3% to 9.334m. Back in 2018, when Seven launched the digital news offering, then chief digital officer Clive Dickens said the site would be number one in the Nielsen ratings within six months. Thus far, it has not made it to the top of the table.
Nine’s Smh.com.au and The Age were in sixth and eighth respectively with 9.127m and 5.106m. They were only down 2.4% and 1.1%.
Nielsen’s top ten news and current events websites in May 2020 [Click to enlarge]
News Corp’s The Daily Telegraph rounded out the top 10, down 16.8% to 3.260m. The Australian no longer sits within the top 10.
The ABC boasts the longest average time spent on site, with 43 minutes and two seconds. The lowest is ACM’s five minutes and 21 seconds.
Outside of the news sites, Junkee’s network had 809,687, up 0.46%, while Urban List climbed 7.79% to 1.374m. Pedestrian Group was seemingly down 9.17% to 4.827m, however Nielsen said there was a tagging issue.
Vice’s results were held back last month, but this month it had a unique audience of 1.055m.
April’s results were only released last week.
topics
7news.com.au
ABC
ABC news websites
ACM
Australian Community Media
Barclay Crawford
Daily Mail
Daily Mail Australia
junkee
news.com.au
Nielsen
Nielsen DCR
Nielsen digital content ratings
Pedestrian
Pedestrian Group
Peter Holder
smh.com.au
The Age
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Guardian Australia
Urban List
Vice
Commercial? Yes.
News site? Hmmmmm
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Nope it wasn’t your hard work daily mail, it was an algorithm change at Google, resulting in surfacing your articles more than others in people feeds.
This goes to show where the power really lies in audience numbers (to a degree).
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What’s up with news.com.au? It’s been number 1 for years (literally) but has dropped out of the top 3 for two months in a row . Was at #6 in April. Am guessing that there’s been a big drop in ad revenue and as a result , to protect their bottom line, they’ve had to cut back on the (significant) amount they spend buying traffic
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That’s interesting. So Google prefers ABC then Daily Mail then Nine and then News. Why?
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Those ads on Daily Mail are terrible. Interstitials from Tiktok which redirect you straight to the app store – is that even legal?
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This may explain the quite significant change in rankings of all news sites, including news.com?
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Surely total time spent and sessions per person are the more meaningful numbers.
In the 31 days of May the top ranked news site averaged 10.5 sessions per person. That’s about one session every third day.
And those 10.5 sessions totaled 43:02 minutes, an average of 4 minutes 6 seconds per session.
So the leading online news site averages around a session every three days for just 4 minutes. And it’s not commercial.
Compare that to the leading commercial TV news for just last week. Seven News reached 2.81m people, and averaged 1.164m people PER MINUTE across the seven 30-minute episodes. And that was just for the Metro stations which only cover around two-thirds of the population (so add around half as much again as a rough guide).
Put another way, ABC News websites were used for around 9.22m minutes in the month of May. Seven News TV (Metro) was viewed for around 244m minutes just last week.
Surprising? Thought provoking?
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hey pal, it’s news.com.au
get it right next time!
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It would be interesting to see the data for what was actually viewed on the Daily Mail vs say The Guardian and the sessions.
(My need to take out the sessions for cat vids on Daily Mail?)
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Sorry just saw this. Why? because they changed the algorithm to surface original content over stuff everyone is copy/pasting. This doesn’t mean quality, it could mean a “scoop” on some celebrity which probably explains the daily mail. It did wonders for The Guardian and ABC for their original reporting but there’s no quality control.
If you make a story “breaking! exclusive! *insert story about half truths”, not sure the algorithm will know if something is bull sh*t or whether it’s the result of investigative journalism. So really this a tough spot for Google to be in, small tweaks make BIG changes.
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Agree. With such low engagement levels, those big unique user numbers are fairly meaningless vanity metrics.
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