Nielsen swings continue as publishers seek to improve measurement coverage
Jumps in estimated audiences measured by Nielsen have continued, with ABC News’ website audiences swelling by more than 10% for the month of June to a unique audience of 8.610m, new Nielsen figures show.
According to Nielsen’s new Digital Content Ratings monthly tagged methodology, ABC News has seen a 14% increase in its audience over last month’s figures. That’s compared to a 5% jump for Nine.com.au – from 7.722m to 8.153m, a 2.8% jump for news.com.au – from 8.827m to 9.084m – and declines of 17% and almost 10% for Daily Mail Australia and The Guardian Australia respectively.
Last month, Daily Mail Australia’s unique audience was 5.894m, while now it sits at 5.036m. Meanwhile, The Guardian has fallen from 3.277m last month to 2.982m.
Daily Mail Australia’s managing director, Peter Holder, had no further comment other than to say he accepted the result and supports Nielsen DCR. The Guardian Australia was also approached for comment.
Nielsen has made a note in this month’s release, arguing some of the drastic changes are to be attributed to publishers improve their tagging.
Also under the new IAB-endorsed measurement tool, time spent on site has decreased dramatically, compared to the Digital Ratings Monthly figures.
In April, news.com.au’s time spent per person sat at 35 minutes and 35 seconds. That number is now at 23 minutes and 46 seconds, according to Nielsen’s June figures. Nine.com.au has also seen a major decrease in time spent on site – 52 minutes and one second in April compared to 23 minutes and 51 seconds in June. Another major drop is The Daily Mail Australia, from 47 minutes and two seconds in April, to 15m and seven seconds in June.
Although the changes can be attributed to the fact off-platform tags – such as those on Facebook – are now counted in the metric, engagement is a priority for media buyers.
The results come several weeks after Nielsen first released the metric, which saw the likes of news.com.au, Nine and the ABC increase their unique audience sizes by millions. Daily Mail Australia saw its audience grow two-fold within the two months.
The new service replaces the Digital Ratings Monthly survey system, which promised better measurement of mobile audiences and websites after publishers had expressed disquiet over the methodology. The dispute caused Fairfax to pull out of the system, while BBC News withdrew from the metric since last week. The new methodology measures those publishers which choose to put in a tag on their various platforms.
For the small to medium size publishers who are currently tagged, BuzzFeed Australia leads the numbers, with a unique audience of 3.369m – bigger than The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, APN News Network, The Australian and couriermail.com.au.
Mamamia’s unique audience is 1.953m, Vice’s audience sits at 1.016m while Junkee Media and Pedestrian’s audiences are at 1.005m and 1.079m respectively.
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Hi Zoe.
Thanks for reporting on the data, but I think you are misreading the data and imputing trends that aren’t there.
First, the numbers will jump around A LOT. That doesn’t mean that the data is wrong. When you consider that to count as part of the Monthly Unique Audience a person only need to visit a site for just one second in the month (which has around 2.5 million seconds). This person counts exactly the same as a person who logs in every day to their favourites news site and spends 5-10 minutes reading. Yes it is an unequal weighting, but that is what it is.
So the “one-second” visitor counts the same as the “regular visitor”, so when you calculate the average time spent it will go down as the numerator (total time spent) increases at a lesser proportion than the denominator (total unique audience).
So a pattern you can often see is that when there are special events (World Cup anyone?) you can see lighter/more casual users increasing the audience but diluting the average time spent. It seems wrong – but that’s what happens. Further, these lighter users tend to make a bigger difference to the smaller trafficked sites.
The other thing to note is that with the new DCR it is a trend break. The system now picks up much more traffic (e.g. off-platform for example). Again the usage patterns will be different, so is off-platform is used less than on-platform the average time may go down even though the UA goes up.
These patterns do not mean that the data are wrong. We are now measuring more of the market for publishers which tag and deploy the SDK where very accurate traffic data is matched to Facebook data (i.e. a bloody big sample) for basic demographics. For publishers that don’t tag-up they will have to rely on the sample of around 10,000 people. If you reach 1% of the population then your active sample is around 100 people. Given that many of the reported publishers only reach fractions of a percentage point they will have very bouncy data simply because so few people (proportionately) visit them.
Key take-outs are that:
* traffic audience
* traffic = easy to count but can be very misleading
* audience = hard to enumerate
* reach = de-duplicated audience across pages, sites and devices is even harder to enumerate … especially if you are trying to quantify the size of the market (which is what the IAB is trying to do).
I hope this helps clear up a few things.
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That first take-out should read:
* traffic is not equal to audience
[‘less than’ and ‘greater than’ are sacred symbols when cutting code – me bad]
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