Nine.com.au sees audience swell by more than 1.5m as it claims fourth spot in digital news rankings
Nine.com.au has jumped from eighth place to fourth in the Nielsen Digital Ratings (Monthly) rankings as the ABC bumped News Corp’s News.com.au from the top spot.
Nine.com.au posted a July audience of 4.537m, up from 2.753m. The dramatic increase can be attributed to the Ninemsn rebrand to Nine.com.au, which now doesn’t count any re-directed MSN traffic, and has enabled the publisher to count its homepage traffic, and lifestyle website traffic, as does news.com.au and smh.com.au.
The July figures also saw Nine.com.au post the highest audience engagement, amongst the top 10 sites, with Nine.com.au reporting an average of 58 minutes and 41 seconds spent per person.
Parsons: “The result is a reflection of our strong commercial strategy”
Alex Parsons, chief digital and marketing officer of Nine Entertainment, said: “In moving from Ninemsn to Nine.com.au, one of Australia’s favourite destinations for news, sport, entertainment and lifestyle content, we have evolved our business.
“Today’s result is an early reflection of the rollout of both our rich and dynamic content and also our strong commercial strategy.”
Meanwhile ABC News saw its audience grow from 5.003m in June to 6.505m in July to claim the top spot on the rankings.
The growth in ABC News’ audiences was due to the 2016 Federal election.
Director of news Gaven Morris said: “ABC News is proud to have achieved the No 1 spot in the Nielsen news rankings. Our online and mobile audiences are as important to ABC News as our television viewers and radio listeners, and it’s gratifying to see they value the services we provide.
“Australians have a huge appetite for high-quality news and current affairs, as well as for the in-depth analysis that makes sense of events and provides context. Their desire for independent, trusted journalism is just as great on digital platforms as on broadcast platforms.
“We’re exploring ideas for how we will continue to improve our digital coverage and services.”
News.com.au also grew its audience but it wasn’t enough to hold onto that top position. It posted a July audience of 6.248m up from 5.463m in June while rival Smh.com.au saw its audience grow from 4.911m in June to 5.227m in July.
In at fifth place was the Daily Mail, staying in the top five despite its audience declining from 3.230m in June to 3.096m in July.
The Guardian also saw their audience slip in July from 3.043m in June to 2.940m in July while Yahoo7 News websites posted a July audience of 2.870m down from 3.079m in June.
The Age jumped back into Nielsen’s top 10 rankings, claiming eighth place after its audience grew by 12% from 2.475m in June to 2.768m in July.
BBC came in at ninth with a July audience of 2.708m followed by the Herald Sun which reported a July audience of 2.417m.
Outside of the top 10, was The Daily Telegraph which reported a July audience of 2.347m, down from June’s audience of 2 .520m. During July News Corp trialled a plan to block users of ad-blockers across the Daily Telegraph, with users of ad-blockers restricted from accessing Daily Telegraph content unless they “white-listed” the site.
Buzzfeed saw its audience climb in July from 1.987m in June to 2.197m in July, as did The Huffington Post which saw its audience jump from 1.897m in June to 2.086m in July.
News Corp’s The Australian also saw its audience grow from 1.584m in June to 1.855m in July while Mamamia posted a July audience of 958,000, down from 1.1m in June.
News Corp’s Courier Mail saw its audience drop slightly to 1.450 in July from 1.556m in June.
The New Daily’s audience grew from 844,000 in June to 910,000 in July.
Miranda Ward worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017, eventually becoming deputy editor. Miranda joined Mumbrella in September 2013 from Sky News.
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Wow what a lovely positive story for Nine. Has Mumbella turned a new leaf…. Or did one of their journos just move there? Hmmmm…
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Nice free kick for Nic. Now it must be pointed out that Daily Mail is doing very well especially since they have no affiliation with anyone!
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Take a deeper look at what’s included under the classification of ‘news’ by Nielsen and if nine.com haven’t recently had more pages (including home page) added to their ‘news’ classification. Bit lazy mumbrella not to check when this may have happened now they aren’t connected to msn before attributing to (wholly) the rebrand.
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I love seeing a non-commercial publisher knock off a commercial publisher.
News Corp. and alike must be embarrassed to know all the millions of dollars they have invested into commercial strategy is not as good as the ABC who don’t have commercial strategy…
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These numbers are rubbery as hell, as evidenced by Nine chucking a whole bunch more pages into the basket and jumping up the rankings. What exactly constitutes “News and Information” as a category? Not sure if it’s still the case now, but a few years back Yahoo7 was counting traffic from Yahoo Answers in with their news ratings. The Top 10 is a useful marketing tool for publishers, but if you dig a little deeper you’re not comparing apples with apples. But who knows, maybe everyone’s bullshit traffic ultimately evens out?
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