Fairfax’s SMH.com.au slips below 4m in December as News Corp’s News.com.au reigns supreme
Fairfax Media’s online unique audience for Sydney masthead The Sydney Morning Herald has tumbled below 4m for the first time since the new Nielsen Digital Ratings launched in February.
For December the site posted a unique audience of 3.648m, down 9% on its November audience of 4.013m.
Its performance saw it beaten by News Corp’s News.com.au, which once again reigned supreme on the top 10 news sites, Nine.com.au and ABC News websites.
News.com.au was the only news site to crack the 5m barrier with a December unique audience of 5.256m, down 2% on November’s audience of 5.351m.
Nine.com.au claimed second place with a unique audience of 4.268m, down 8% on November’s audience of 4.621m, while ABC News reported a December audience of 4.203m, down 13% on November’s 4.835m.
The Daily Mail remained steady at fifth place despite a 12% month-on-month decline from 3.072m in November to a unique audience of 2.716m in December.
The Guardian came in at sixth place with a December audience of 2.578m, down 12% on its November figure of 2.941m.
Yahoo7 News was down 15% from its November audience of 2.936m, dropping to 2.482m in December, while the BBC posted a December audience of 2.404m, down 9% on November’s 2.649m.
Rounding out the top 10 was News Corp’s Herald Sun, with a December audience of 2.172m, down 2% from November’s 2.219m, and Fairfax Media’s The Age, down 2% from November’s 2.084m to sit at 2.032m in December.
Outside of the top 10, Buzzfeed posted a December audience of 1.759m, down 9% on November’s unique audience of 1.930m, while The Huffington Post reported a decline of 26%, month-on-month, with a December audience of 1.550m, down from November’s 2.085m.
News Corp’s The Australian reported a December audience of 1.214m, 2% down on November’s audience of 1.239m while fellow masthead Couriermail.com.au saw its December audience sit at 1.466m, 7% down from November’s 1.575m.
The New Daily saw its audience slip below 1m, reported a December audience of 828,000, down 18% from its November audience of 1.007m.
Mamamia reported a unique audience for December of 845,000, down 2% from November’s 862,000 while Mashable saw its audience slip 33% month-on-month, down from November’s 487,000 to 326,000.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Hardly surprising news about the SMH. Its truly become an echo chamber for the left wing brigade with ‘Comment’ articles i.e. personal opinion/agenda of the editors masquerading as ‘News’ in the most prominent positions on the website. Time for a non-biased news organisation that doesn’t have strong political allegiances in this country
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Another win for click bait. Sad.
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I wonder who cares? Aggregate traffic is meaningless to both the media businesses and advertisers. The aggregators have the big numbers and much better data that the publishers.
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I love smh. The monthly paywall thing doesn’t work. I’ve been reading smh from 1st till 15th of every month for years. Then it runs out. Fix your payment structure. Now.
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writings on the wall for pay to read web news and the diminished interest for people to pay and read will only further increase.
the new generations have been ripping movies n music for years and they aren’t going to tolerate paying to read a newspaper online… as the one centralized free web news model NEWS.COM cements its readers further into the free model it just needs to have a stat by state balance and not be Sydney centric
keep a weathered eye on social media…its the one service that is instant, free and would be simple to ramp up as a singular free news report
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‘Left wing brigade’? Brush up on your political compass please.
I would say that the biggest threat to SMH has been The Guardian.
SMH and News.com.au are click bait central, which is very sad. In terms of ‘comments’; have you read the comments on News’ network? It’s like an angry mob from the middle ages!
God day and brush up will ya!
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Well if you read my comment properly my friend you would have got the point I was making. I’m in no way denying that the News brigade is biased, blind Freddy knows the News agenda. My point was they are all the same… Self serving. Obviously the Guradian is left wing, are you ludicrously denying that the SMH is as well? I think YOU need to spend more time brushing up on your reading and comprehension skills
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Misleading numbers alert!
As you can see the SMH.com.au and News.com.au are not even comparable
Because News is an amalgamation of all the 4 metro mastheads
Whereas SMH is just SMH not Fairfax
Also on the numbers scale, they have started capturing data only from Feb of last year, therefore they have “NO COMPARISON” with Dec of last year and I do – and I can tell you Dec is always a bad month – both for News and SMH
If you look at News decline – it has gone down across last few months too
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Hi SWCRN,
I think you’re mistaken there. If I understand correctly, the news.com.au numbers provided by Nielsen don’t actually include the traffic for the various other mastheads. You’ll see for instance in the table below that the top ten includes the Herald Sun separately. Because of News Corp’s paywall strategy you won’t see their mastheads perform as strongly on this metric as you will news.com.au which is of course free.
But I think you’re right that both smh.com.au and news.com.au have seen something of a recent decline. A good indicator that they are feeling the pressure there for me has been to see both of them using paid posts in Facebook to boost traffic.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella