AFL And NRL Grand Finals Drive Australian Digital Audiences To Their Smartphones

Sydney, Australia, 11 October 2018: When holistically looking at time spent accessing text content in September 2018, desktop devices were the device of choice (46%), according to the latest Nielsen Digital Content Ratings data. This was followed by smartphones at 36% and tablets at 18%.

However, when specifically looking at the sports sub-category (which for the month of September included the AFL and NRL grand finals), audiences took to their smartphone devices to support their favourite teams. 58% of time consumed was on a smartphone, 32% on a desktop and 10% on a tablet. Audiences also saw considerable spikes when compared to the average day on the respective grand final days.

• 29 September: on average, sports sites reported a 44% higher audience on the AFL grand final day than they had seen during the month.

• 30 September: on average, sports sites reported a 37% higher audience on the NRL grand final day than they had seen during the month.

Source: Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, September 2018, Average Daily Tagged (Text), 2+, Sports Sub Category

Nielsen Digital Content Ratings monthly-tagged data for September 2018 revealed that news.com.au was the top news entity in terms of highest unique audience (9.4 million), followed by nine.com.au (8.4 million) and then ABC News Websites (8.1 million). Fourth place was Daily Mail (6.0 million).  

Next in the Nielsen online news rankings was Yahoo7 (4.4 million), followed by The Guardian (3.8 million) in sixth position.

In seventh position was The Daily Telegraph (2.8 million), followed by  Herald Sun with a unique audience of 2.8 million. In ninth place was APN Australian Regional Media  – News Network (2.2 million) followed by The Australian (2.2 million).