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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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
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)
This is getting like the Ashes. Surely our news outlets can beat the UK news providers like the Mail and Guardian.
Here here! C’mon!
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.
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?