The Punch, News Ltd’s push into online comment and aggregation, has hit its first anniversary locked in a two-horse race with Crikey to lead the segment.
In a posting today, the site says that it has generated 111,000 reader comments during its first year.
According to Nielsen Market Intelligence, The Punch is reaching slightly fewer unique daily browsers than Crikey, although the lead has swapped back and forth over the last 12 months.
May 1 to May 30 saw The Punch averaging 12,746 daily users to Crikey’s 15,042.
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Meanwhile, according to Nielsen, the independent commentry site New Matilda, which announced last week that it was to close later this month, averaged 2,093 daily unique domestic visitors.
Other sites such as Fairfax’s National Times and the ABC’s The Drum are not covered by the Nielsen data.
When monthly page impressions are taken into account, Crikey has a big lead over The Punch – with 2,568,507 impressions from May 1 to May 30 to The Punch’s 837,950. Crikey averages more than twice as many page views per session as The Punch – perhaps implying a more aggressive autorefresh policy.
The previous year has seen the lead for average unique daily browsers switch back and forth bettween Crikey and the Punch.
The Punch went ahead of Crikey for daily unique browsers in July and August, but since last September, shortly after Crikey revamped its website, it has led.
June 2, 2.15pm Update: In reply to the comment thread below, this is Nielsen’s data for Online Opinion:
