Telstra websites draw more visitors than News Corp and Fairfax in latest online ratings
Nielsen Online Ratings by parent company | December2013
Telstra is now a bigger digital publisher than News Corp Australia and Fairfax Media, the latest Nielsen Online Ratings have revealed.
According to Nielsen, the Telstra Media Group’s portfolio was the eighth most popular group of websites last month with 6.063m unique visitors, just over 100,000 more than News Corp Australia’s 5.961m, with an even bigger lead over Fairfax Media’s 5.946m.
Adam Good, Telstra’s director of digital media and content, said he would have been happy to just make the top 10, but puts Telstra’s success down to its focus on developing premium content over the last six to 12 months through its partnerships with Sky News and Foxtel’s Lifestyle Channel, as well as the strong sports brands of the AFL and NRL.
In doing so Telstra has moved away from its former Big Pond brand and consolidated its digital rights assets with NRL and AFL and new partnerships with Sky News and the Lifestyle Channel. Telstra also provides a music streaming service to paying subscribers, MOG Music, as well as paid subscriptions for live sport.
“What we’ve really been trying to do is just get the best content partners on board and we think we’ve got a really good balance now of that sport, news, lifestyle, entertainment, and music,” Good said.
“We’re starting to get the right mix now, so it’s a good result. We’re pretty happy to sit there at number eight and with the footy season coming up hopefully we can go up another couple of notches.”
Telstra partnered with the Multi Channel Network (MCN), the sales house for Foxtel, just over a year ago and is offering multiscreen and integrated advertising packages across its assets along with Foxtel’s.
“I think that story of where the advertising market’s going is looking at ways you can do advertising across platforms, across devices across screens. Its nice to see that our web and mobile assets are doing well and I think that supports the pay television story as well,” Good said.
Both Fairfax Media and News Corporation introduced paywalls on its titles last year, with News Corp leading the way in May and Fairfax setting up pay subscriptions for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in July. This was followed by a drop in audience numbers for both Fairfax Media and News Corp Australia, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen Online Ratings for December also saw Nine Entertainment Company’s NineMSN win the most unique visitors for any online news site in Australia as audiences fell for Fairfax Media’s smh.com.au and News Corp’s news.com.au.
News Corp and Fairfax declined to comment.
Expect to see the Telstra Media Group’s number go down within three months when Telstra completes the Sensis divestment. (Telstra Media Group currently includes http://www.yellowpages.com.au & http://www.whitepages.com.au)
I can well believe this ; I spend hours on their Customer Service and complaints site.
What is Yellow Pages?
“In Australia, Nielsen’s online panel measures the activity of more than 7,000 Internet users across more than 6,500 sites” Hardly representative…
Do the Telstra numbers include their corporate, sales and service channels ie Telstra.com and bigpond.com along with their content sites? What about afl.com and NFL.com.au?
Minnie Telstra numbers include all the properties in the Telstra Media portfolio (former BigPond portal). Note all the media properties in the navigation bar found at http://media.telstra.com. So yes it includes AFL, NRL. But it does exclude Telstra.com which for now is not included in this parent grouping. Bruce as for the numbers will drop with a change of ownership percentage of Sensis. Telstra will have a 30 per cent stake so there is no confirmed reason to suggest they would not be part of our network in the future.