News.com.au no longer Australia’s most read news site
News.com.au is no longer the country’s most-read news site, having held that position for over a year.
ABC News was the most-read news website in June, with news.com.au falling to second spot. Although the ABC dropped readership by 0.4%, news.com.au fell 2.1%, from 12.7 million readers to under 12.5 million.
News.com.au was the country’s leading news site since April 2023, after losing its top ranking to the ABC for close to three years as the pandemic hit and the country turned to the national broadcaster for updates.
The latest result comes after news.com.au’s editor-in-chief, Lisa Muxworthy, was made redundant at the end of May amidst the company’s staff cuts.
Muxworthy was named editor-in-chief of news.com.au in December 2020, and is widely credited for rebuilding the site into the country’s most-read news site.
“It was definitely a tough road,” she told Mumbrella last year. “Did it keep me up at night? From time-to-time, sure. But really, I’m probably thinking about news.com.au 24-7 anyway. It was a tough time.
“We had to ask ourselves some serious questions. Are we telling the stories people want to read? Are we in the right places, in terms of where people are consuming news? Where do we need to put our focus? What do we need to change?
“It made us look at what we could do differently and where the opportunities are.”
“I think losing our number one spot for that period of time wasn’t a bad thing,” Muxworthy said of the last time ABC took their crown. “You’ve got to be able to look critically at yourself and try to be better, always. You’re not challenged to do that if you’re always at the top.”
Nine.com.au gained 1.1% to keep its third position, while 7news.com.au slipped 0.6%, with its newsrooms currently in the rebuilding stages under new boss Anthony De Ceglie.
The Daily Mail dropped 3.4% in June, following a 4.3% drop in May, while The Guardian’s readership took a 8.7% hit.
Yahoo News has jumped a whopping 24.9% to command 6.27 million readers, while SBS and The Age both fell.
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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They used to call themselves ‘the voice of the people’ in agency pitches.
The people have spoken.
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Less eyeballs on Murdoch media is good for the country.
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Nothing of substance is why. Clickbait can only do so much for so long… Trashiest site – shouldn’t even be in the “news” category. Editor change is not the reason.
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I wonder how long before these publications will pull out of IPSOS in the same way they did the ABC to save costs and just move back to internal numbers.
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Do they even employ journalists anymore? Or is the entire bullpen just an AI software license that rips the most upvoted local Reddit topics and converts them into a barely readable and non-spellchecked article with an unrelated image of a woman in a bikini?
Should News.com.au be paying Reddit huge fees under the News bargaining code to host Reddit’s content?
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Can anyone explain the dramatic Yahoo jump? SEO results related to a Google algo change perhaps?
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So sick of going to news sites and being bombarded with ads. Why do we need to see multiple ads when we are looking for news.
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