News.com.au reclaims top spot as several sites see big drops
News.com.au has reclaimed the top spot in the Nielsen online news rankings for November leapfrogging the smh.com.au, but both sites suffered a dip in unique audience from October.
Today’s figures are also the first time Nine Entertainment has renamed its website offerings together the audiences for its properties Ninemsn and 9News under the banner of 9News websites, with editor-in-chief Hal Crawford saying they include the same assets as before. The sites had a slight boost on last month’s 2.464m unique user figure, to 2.489m.
That comes despite Ninemsnlosing the logout traffic from former partner Microsoft’s suite of assets including Hotmail and Skype, with Crawford telling Mumbrella he was “very happy” with the result, and saying Nine is lobbying Nielsen for a review to have the Ninemsn homepage included in the traffic rankings now it does not have the redirect traffic.
For the first time the Daily Mail Australia overtook the Nine sites, with a unique audience of 2.519m. Nine is the sales house and local partner for the local version of the site of the British publisher.
The BBC News site, which ranked tenth in October after starting to ramp up its Australian presence, has been left out of the current rankings with Nielsen saying there is a “classification review” of the site which has undergone a recent overhaul to “ensure a consistent application of the category rules”. The parent site had a unique audience of 2.3m.
The build up to the Victorian state election also gave a boost to the two Melbourne metro mastheads the Herald Sun and The Age, which both saw a lift on the previous month to 2.349m for Fairfax’s The Age and 1.907m for its News Corp competitor.
Both mastheads leapfrogged The Guardian, with the site dropping below last month’s record figures to 1.9m in ninth place. The Daily Telegraph also made a rare appearance in the top ten courtesy of the absence of the BBC, with 1.716m.
Whilst News.com.au climbed back to the top its audience of 3.691m was down on the 3.734m, whilst Fairfax’s smh.com.au plummeted from 3.824m last month to 3.471m in November.
Alex Hayes
“both sites suffered a dip in unique audience from October”
And how did they do year-on-year? That’s more important than seasonal variations.
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Hi Tim,
Year-on-year comparisons are pretty invalid since Nielsen found an additional two million new online users in April. https://mumbrella.com.au/nielsen-online-audience-measurement-changes-220649
Everything has been well up since then.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
Hi guys,
Check out active reach, it is your best bet for a year-on-year comparison.
Cheers,
Jon
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@Tim – sounds more likely both were hit with Google’s Penguin update dealing with dodgy links – the timing seems spot on. It would be interesting to see if that is the case.
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I would love to read a feature on real stats, variety of independent monitoring tools and some news events around the peaks and trophs, over a few years. Anyone?⅞
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Clearly bogans have discovered the Internet
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“Nielsen found an additional two million new online users in April”
hahahhaa. an entire industry premised on bullshitting itself.
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