More record audiences for online news sites in July
The Daily Mail Australia has crept another place up the Nielsen Online rankings, overtaking Yahoo!7’s digital assets and adding another 23,000 readers in July from June.
News.com.au extended its lead at the top of the table with a unique audience of 3.937m readers, it’s biggest ever audience, which Nielsen says gives it an audience reach of 22.51 per cent. Smh.com.au dropped slightly but maintained second place with 3.453m, whilst Ninemsn’s suite of sites is third with 3.033m readers, with the site continuing as the logoff page for the Microsoft Outlook email service.
July saw a series of high-profile news events including the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines plane MH17 over the Ukraine, fresh conflict in Gaza and a number of sporting events including the FIFA World Cup final and Tour de France.
Source: Nielsen
The other British news group in the survey The Guardian also recorded its biggest Australian audience to date with a 1.870m unique audience, staying in ninth spot just ahead of News Corp’s Daily Telegraph which saw a slight dip in audience.
“July figures showed our highest market share to date. We saw strong readership off the back of some major stories in July, including our coverage of the Tamil asylum seeker High Court decision and the recent major global sporting events; the FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon and the Tour de France,” said Emily Wilson, editor, Guardian Australia.
Editor of news.com.au Daniel Sankey said the MH17 tragedy as well as several important domestic stories had helped to drive more visitors to the site.
“On July 18, Australia woke to the terrible news that MH17 had been shot down. As difficult as it was to report on an event in which 298 passengers, including 38 Australian citizens and permanent residents, lost their lives, we had a responsibility to our readers to bring them the latest breaking news on this unfolding tragedy,” he said.
“July also featured a number of major domestic stories, including the freak ‘megablizzard’ that brought record snowfalls to Victoria and New South Wales and a fatal stabbing at Westfield Parramatta that occurred in front of shocked shoppers. There was strong interest in the Gerard Baden-Clay trial in Queensland, while sports fans stayed glued to our live rolling coverage of the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.”
Viral content website Buzzfeed had 1.8m visitors last month but is not included in the top 10 news websites despite having a greater audience than the Daily Telegraph as it is not allowed in the same category of news as the other websites.
Meanwhile The Courier Mail had an audience of 1.451m (up from 1.42m), The Australian had an audience of 1.22m last month (down from 1.32m), while The Conversation had 315,000, (down from 352,000).
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Where’s the Australian on your list?
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“Ninemsn’s suite of sites is third with 3.033m readers, with the site continuing as the logoff page for the Microsoft Outlook email service.”
This is false. Outlook redirects to the ninemsn Homepage, who’s UA’s are not included in the News “suite of sites” nor the top ten ranking.
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I’m curious why the Age website does comparatively poorly relative to its stable mate The Sydney Morning Herald online, but comparatively well for print sales. When you look at daily sales of physical papers, SMH sold 126,000 in the March quarter; the Age was at 118,000. SMH is 7% ahead. Online the gap is 77% for July.
The population of NSW is about 28% greater than Victoria’s; the population of Sydney is about 10% more than Melbourne. Perhaps the difference between print sales can be mostly explained by the size of the cities, as I presume that this is the area where most print copies are sold. Once you get into regional areas, I’m guessing people are less interested in paying for metro-focused content. I’m also guessing that non-capital city folk are happy enough reading the online equivalent because it is free, so suggest that the state population numbers might be a better guide to potential readership.
The SMH has a much larger non-capital city pool of potential readers, but that doesn’t explain why its online readership is 77% greater than the Age.
Are there other factors? Do other Fairfax assets or Google News tend to redirect to the SMH rather tha the Age?
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Yes, KF, you’re on the money with the last one.
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