News.com.au leaps back into second place in Nielsen digital top ten
News.com.au experienced a 20.2% surge of growth in July to rocket back up to second in Nielsen’s digital content ratings (DCR), after the website sat at fourth for May and June, and fell to sixth spot in April.
Every top 10 publisher increased its unique audience when compared to the previous month, and seven of those 10 had double digit growth. But the cohort’s strong performance wasn’t enough to displace ABC from the top spot, with a unique audience of 13.25m, 11.9 sessions per person, and readers spending an average of 46 and a half minutes on the site.
The most impressive growth came from The Australian, which was up 20.7% to keep hold of tenth place and keep the Daily Telegraph off the top list. News.com.au was just behind its News Corp stablemate with a 20.2% climb, followed by Nine’s The Age on 17.8%.
When the DT was last in top ten I recall around 3M UAs per month.
Even if assuming that 20% of UAs are subscribers on DT, thats still close to 800k people (which in reality is no where close to this figures) meaning over 10% of everyone in NSW was paying to read the Tele.
The rest are blocked by the hard paywall and can’t even access the content at all but no ad served.
Yes advertisers have value in reaching paying subscribers only, but the monthly UA reach doesn’t mean anything at all. Where’s the value in these numbers?
The industry should recognise the importance of engagement over audience numbers. This monthly beauty parade offers negligible value whereas focusing on how audiences spend time with the media brings meaningful, actionable insights.