After slumps across the board in December, Nielsen’s digital news rankings for January 2018 revealed News.com.au, ABC News and nine.com.au’s traffic all saw improved audiences compared with the previous year.
News.com.au remained the top news site, growing 2% from January 2017 to a unique audience of 5.4m.
In second place were ABC News websites, which grew 11% to 4.8m uniques. The substantial increase meant the site moved up from third place when compared to January 2017.
This meant the ABC switched places with nine.com.au, which landed the third place spot after it grew by 4% from the previous year to 4.6m.
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After suffering a 3% fall to 3.9m, Smh.com.au remained in fourth place.
Yahoo7 News Websites moved from seventh to fifth place after a 25% increase to a unique audience of 3.3m.
The Daily Mail dropped from fifth place to sixth place on the previous year after suffering a 17% fall to 2.6m.
The Guardian had previously held sixth place in January 2017, but a 5% decline with an audience of 2.6m saw it fall back to seventh place.
News Corp’s Herald Sun grew by 2.5m, 8% compared to December 2017. MSN News finished the month with 2.3m uniques with an increase of 6% on the previous year and BBC, which dropped 4% on the previous year to achieve the same number.
Outside of the bigger news sites was the Daily Telegraph, with a unique audience of 2.133m. It was up by 1.72% compared to the previous month.
The HuffPost – which scaled back its editorial operations last year – fell by 2% to a unique audience of 1.170m. The Australian also saw a slight dip, down 2.48% to a unique audience of 1.339m but The Courier Mail climbed 9.7% to an audience of 1.318m.
Meanwhile Buzzfeed’s audience fell by 22.8% compared to December figures, with a unique audience of 1.124m. Other youth websites saw their audiences grow sizeably, with Pedestrian up 46.68% to 773,000 and Junkee’s audience climbing 63.5% to 211,000.
Mamamia’s audience grew by 28% to a unique audience of 747,000 and The New Daily’s audience was up 25% to 842,000.
December Results: ABC News and The Guardian record big drops in digital audiences across December
November Results: Daily Telegraph’s website traffic fell by more than 600,000 in November, Nielsen finds
October Results: Yahoo7 falls back and Mashable surges in latest Nielsen digital news rankings
September Results: Yahoo7’s audience swells to 3m, makes top five news websites
August Results: ABC News websites close in on News.com.au thanks to 11% climb, Nielsen rankings report
July Results: ABC News websites bump Nine to third in latest Nielsen rankings
June Results: Gap closes between Nine and News websites, Nielsen rankings find
May results: BBC climbs 16% in Australia as international events dominate in month of May, reveals Nielsen rankings
April (amended) results: Nielsen says digital news rankings for April were wrong, and Guardian didn’t beat Daily Mail after all
March results: ABC News claims second place on Nielsen Digital News rankings as Nine.com.au falls into third place
February results: Daily Telegraph grabs ninth place in Nielsen news rankings as News.com.au builds on lead position
January results: Fairfax Media’s SMH.com.au climbs back above 4m in January as News.com.au holds top spot in news rankings