Political drama gives news sites a boost
Australia’s online news sites enjoyed a traffic boost as independent MPs final picked Julia Gillard to form a government with yesterday.
According to data on yesterday’s traffic from Nielsen MarketIntelligence, the Sydney Morning Herald had 882,436 unique browsers for the day – up by nearly 16% on Monday – and 1,542,902 visits.
Nine News, with 740,551 UBs, was the only news site that saw a slight drop in UBs for the day.
News.com.au and The Australian were both up by more than 18%. There were more than 400,000 video views across the News Digital Media network.
Tim, I applaud you adding the warning that UBs are subject to being inflated due to cookie deletion. However, given that this is a daily UB, the effect of cookie deletion will be minimal (mid-single digits as a guide), so the magnitude of these numbers are pretty representative.
However, I thought I would provide some data to add perspective. If you look at yesterday’s TV ratings just for Metro TV, and you just look at the News & Current Affairs programmes lumped together, you get reach figures (basically the same as daily UBs) of between 6.3m and 7.1m for each of the commercial networks, 5.7m for the ABC, 3.1m for Subscription TV and 2.6m for SBS. And that is just for the metro markets which are around 69% of Australia’s population – so it would be safe to say you could add on another 40%-45% to those figures.
Cheers.