News.com.au still Australia’s most popular news website, despite gains from Seven, ABC and Nine
September proved to be a good month for digital publishers, with the majority seeing growth in the Nielsen Digital Content Ratings (DCR). Daily Mail Australia was shown to be the best performer with 42% growth, followed by 7News.com.au with 14% and Yahoo with 13%.
It was also a good month for News.com.au which jumped 8% on last month and managed to land back above 10m unique viewers for the month – a milestone it first hit in December 2018.
The only publishers in the top 10 which saw a decline for the month of September were Nine’s Smh.com.au which dropped 3% to 7.44m in unique audience, and The Guardian which fell 5%, although Nielsen reported a tagging issue with the title.
Nielsen September DCR top current events and global news sites [Click to enlarge]
Nine.com.au grew 12% to 8.719m, followed by Smh.com.au on 7.44m. 7News.com.au rounded out the top five with 6.674m.
In terms of time spent per person, ABC News websites reported the highest figure with 34 minutes and 26 seconds, followed by News.com.au on 29.04. News.com.au also reported the highest sessions per person with 8.7.
Daily Mail Australia saw a unique audience of 5.421m, The Guardian brought in 4.325m and Australian Community Media Network rose 8% to 4.072m.
The Age and Yahoo rounded out the top 10, with 4.013m and 3.876m respectively. The Age grew 10%.
Pedestrian Group, which recently began reporting its numbers as a group, including the Allure titles, grew 3% to 3.566m, and Vice Media Network also rose 3% to 1.060m. Junkee held steady on 1.071m.
Urban List grew its unique audience to 1.548m, while Concrete Playground had its highest ever unique audience with 1.005m. 10 Daily reported 1.47 million – it’s biggest readership to date.
a 42% MoM rise for Daily Mail? Any clues as to why this huge (and somewhat unbelievable) surge in audience?
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… do mean that the light blue line is getting back to what it was a few months ago?
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They seem to have put a lot of money behind paid facebook posts recently. I can’t seem to get them out of my feed.
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It looks like daily mail is merely back to levels it was back in May and June – you should have seen that before jumping to your “unbelievable” conclusion.
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When will Finder and Canstar be included in this list?
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Hi Peter,
Thanks for your comment. The sites included in this list, and in the graphic, are tagged as news and current affairs sites. Finder and Canstar would not be tagged that way, which is why they aren’t included.
Thanks,
Hannah – Mumbrella
The “simply getting back to where they were months ago” explanation would make sense if we had seen a steady increase over the last few months. Doesn’t really explain that very big single month increase. Also raises obvious question: if this 42% jump represents DM returning to normal numbers, What happened to drive their “normal” numbers down by 42% in the first place
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