The Daily Telegraph’s website traffic fell by more than 600,000 in November, Nielsen finds
November’s Nielsen digital ratings saw major traffic declines across most news websites, with The Daily Telegraph falling outside of the top 10.
The Tele suffered a unique audience decline of 600,000 – or 24% – from the previous month, down to 1.917m from 2.520m.
The Daily Telegraph’s Peter Brown attributed the fall to football finals driving high October traffic, the site switching to the secure https web protocol in November and more content being published behind the News Corp paywall.
In a post on the Daily Telegraph website in late November, Brown was quoted as saying: “In October, to quote a literary giant, ‘we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave’ on the back of the NRL Grand Final, a historical Bathurst 1000 and the already iconic $10 million Everest at Randwick.
“But November was a remarkable month for us in terms of reinforcing the value of our journalism. Page impressions and unique browsers are seductive, and vital, for our free counterparts but we’re more than happy sacrifice audience size to build a robust and secure foundation for loyal paid subscribers.
“I have no doubt it’s the future for all digital publishers.”
Update: News Corp has since clarified that two days of audience data were lost as Nielsen was not aware the site had moved to https. Once they were informed, it was corrected. Nielsen’s methods are able to measure audiences on secure sites.
MSN News entered the top 10 with a unique audience of 2.030m, despite a slight fall from October’s 2.049m.
Of the top ten, only two publishers reported growth – ABC News websites and the Herald Sun.
ABC News websites climbed by 5% to 5.201m while Herald Sun’s unique audience was 2.507m, up 2.1%.
News.com.au finished on top despite a 4% decline, reporting a unique audience of 5.684m. Nine.com.au remained stagnant with a unique audience of 4.621m.
Smh.com.au suffered one of the biggest falls, down 8.5% from October figures to an audience of 3.911m.
The Guardian, Yahoo7 News and Daily Mail Australia suffered declines of 6.5%, 6.3% and 8.9% respectively.
Declines across the three publishers brought The Guardian’s unique audience to 2.634m, Yahoo7 News’ audience to 2.578m and Daily Mail Australia’s to 2.553m.
BBC’s audience also saw a slight drop, down 3% to 2.265m.
This story was updated 10:32am, 11 January to reflect News Corp’s clarifications.
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March results: ABC News claims second place on Nielsen Digital News rankings as Nine.com.au falls into third place
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January results: Fairfax Media’s SMH.com.au climbs back above 4m in January as News.com.au holds top spot in news rankings
The garish, clunky re-design they did to the DT site a couple of months back probably didn’t help
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Surely the editorial line has had an impact too e.g. the coverage of the SSM debate late last year went from the traditional conservative stance to just outright bizarre (Al Bundy the lead image?!). Often these articles were outside the paywall.
Given it’s young people that are far more likely to get their news online rather than subscribe to the physical paper, the Daily Tele’s choice to alienate the young by such an extreme editorial line (even compared to sister papers like the Herald Sun) will have an ongoing impact.
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