News

News.com.au takes out number one in the news rankings

News Limited website news.com.au has overtaken Ninemsn as Australia’s highest traffic news website for the first time.

The site was the most visited news website in Australia in April according to the Nielsen Online Ratings with 2.872m readers compared with 2.819m for Ninemsn. Yahoo!7 was third with 2.77m and SMH.com.au fourth with 2.747m.

The victory comes after the site moved to a more populist approach under editor Luke McIlveen which saw the site continue to offer news, but add more memes and viral video to the mix.

Rankings

Matt Bruce, Nielsen’s managing director for media audience measurement said coverage of the Boston Bombings had driven readers to all of the news sites.

“The news category was an extremely competitive category last month”, said Bruce. “Among the top four sites there is less than 150,000 people in unique audience from first to fourth.”

“In April we had the Boston bombing which drove traffic and compared to other sites in the category news.com.au had more traffic than others. So if there is one thing that has driven them getting to the number one spot it is that.”

McIlveen said in a statement: “Our team lives and breathes news – and this survey is just the beginning of a great journey with our readers and advertisers.

“This is a wonderful vote of confidence from the most important people in our business – our customers. When a story like Boston breaks, our readers turn to us because they know they will get unrivalled coverage.”

Ninemsn editor-in-chief Hal Crawford said he welcomed the competition. “ninemsn has consistently been the leading digital news source for the past 5 years, the battles have been fierce through that time, and they will continue.Competition is always good for the audience,” said Crawford.

Earlier this month, News Limited’s editorial director Campbell Reid said in a Mumbrella Hangout that news.com.au would remain outside of the company’s paywalls but be an important marketing tool for its News+ offerings.

Nic Christensen

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