The Australian knocks The Daily Telegraph from Nielsen digital news top ten
News Corp Australia’s The Australian has made it back into the Nielsen Digital Content Ratings top ten, pushing The Daily Telegraphy from tenth position and returning to the list for the first time since March 2020.
The change was the only in the top ten, with ABC News Websites retaining the number one spot for the sixth month running, followed by the Daily Mail which moved into second spot three months ago to become the most-read commercial news site.
June 2020’s ranking saw Australian audiences spend 36.7% more time engaging with news content online compared to the same month in 2019. The most substantial increase was seen across computers, where Australians spent 41.9% more time accessing news content, compared to 33.7% across mobile.
ABC News Websites recorded a unique audience of 12.372m for the month of June 2020, sitting well above Daily Mail Australia which recorded 10.152m.
The Nielsen DCR top ten June 2020 [click to enlarge]
Nine.com.au secured 9.991m, followed by news.com.au with 9.674m. 7News.com.au held 9.023m to hold fifth place, followed by smh.com.au with 8.883m and The Guardian with 7.424m.
The Age secured 4.841m, Australian Community Media Network 3.762m and The Australian held 3.124m for tenth place. Only The Australian and news.com.au recorded a rise in audience for the month, ABC News Websites dropped from 12.835m and the Daily Mail dropped from 10.643m.
The Daily Telegraph fell to 14th place with 2.587m UA, while Yahoo, The Herald Sun and couriermail.com.au all sat above it. Perthnow rounded out the top 15, followed by The New Daily which rose almost 500,000 UA to 1.963m.
In the small publishers, Vice Media Network rose 30% to 1.372m UA. Urban List also rose slightly to 1.507m from 1.374m last month, while both Pedestrian and Junkee dropped, 5% and 7% respectively to 4.598m and 756,753. Vice Media recently underwent mass redundancies as it struggled to overcome the economic implications of COVID-19. Man of Many rose 7.1% across the month, confirming its place as largest men’s lifestyle digital publisher in Australia, above Boss Hunting, GQ Australia and Men’s Health AU.
topics
7news.com.au
ABC
ABC news websites
ACM
Australian Community Media
Daily Mail
Daily Mail Australia
DCR
Digital Content Ratings
News Corp Australia
news.com.au
Nielsen
Nielsen DCR
Nielsen digital content ratings
Nine
Nine.com.au
smh.com.au
The Age
The Australian
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian
The Guardian Australia
The Sydney Morning Herald
If the Tele has a lower reach than The Australian and isn’t even in the top 10 anymore then it is going the way of The Sun in the UK and will soon remove its paywall.
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News.com.au’s fall from #1 spot – which it held for years – seems to be well and truly entrenched. Have they dropped audience, or have others gained? Or a bit of both? At least their engagement numbers (average 36mins/user/month) look good relative to the rest.
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This is getting like the Ashes. Surely our news outlets can beat the UK news providers like the Mail and Guardian.
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Hi Asaf,
In March 2020 Nielsen changed the metric by which it measures the DCR. Here’s a quote – From 1 March 2020 Nielsen upgraded the unique audience scaling methodology from a frequency-based scaling methodology to one that incorporates a combination of frequency and overlap factors between mobile applications and browsers to better reflect changing digital user behaviour.
As an observer, it appears that is when the usual ranking (news.com.au had held the top spot for somewhere in the realm of 50 DCRs) changed long-term, although it is also worth noting readership increased a lot during the bushfires and during COVID-19 so it’s likely a combination of multiple factors.
Thanks,
Hannah – Mumbrella
Here here! C’mon!
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Thanks Hannah — although Nielson’s explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Whatever changes Nielson made to measurement methodology, you’d think it would impact publishers roughly equally. Why would these changes have a greater negative impact on news.com.au than on other news sites?
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Hi Asaf,
I agree, it doesn’t make much sense and to be honest I am just making an educated guess based on the timing. But there could be something else at play and it will be interesting to see how the data shifts again when (if) the COVID-19 lockdowns pass and news reporting returns to (somewhat) normal.
Thanks,
Hannah – Mumbrella
It must be of note that the average time spent on the ABC is significantly above the others. The Daily Mail (#2) only had average time spent of 17 minutes VS ABC on 39 minutes.
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Few reasons to why i think ABC readership improved,
ABC clearly has no ads and that means lesser distractions – so readers might have preferred to read it more often.
Fewer ads, results in increase engagement and that leads to higher google rankings with increased readership
ABC is funded by govt, so could have been pursued as trusted source ( resulting in increased direct traffic)
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Daily Mail has invested massively in Australian journalism – no wonder they are number 2 website now – most journos have always gone there to see what’s going on, probably the rest of the country has caught on?
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