Australians making moves in January

Education, career and travel websites spike in the New Year

Sydney, Australia – 11 February 2016 – The first Nielsen Online Ratings figures of 2016 reveal that Australians spent the first month of the year online planning the year ahead. While current events and global news ranking remained relatively stable, January figures show spikes in travel as well as education and career focused websites.

As the festive season came to a close, several travel related websites experience increased audiences including airlines and hotel research and booking sites. Qantas led the airline sub-category with an audience of 1.9 million, while Virgin saw a 19 percent increase since December to an audience of 1.2 million. Qatar Airways saw a 357 percent month on month spike off a small audience in December, and Air New Zealand and Air Asia both experienced over 110 percent increases since December.

Many Australians have also been booking or researching their next trip, with all top 10 entities in the cruise lines, hotels/hotel directories & multi-category travel categories seeing double digital audience growth since December. Overall, the hotels/hotel directories sub-category experienced a 25 percent increase since December, with Booking.com seeing an increase of 55 percent to an audience of 1.9 million, while second placed Trivago experienced the highest increase of 187 percent to 760,000 people.

TABLE 1. TOP SITES RANKED BY UNIQUE AUDIENCE FOR NEWS 

Source: Nielsen Online Ratings, Hybrid data January, 2016

Educational and career focused websites also saw an increase in audience as school leavers researched their tertiary education options and submitted preferences, while workers looked into career development opportunities or a new position. UAC, the Universities Admission Centre’s website, experienced a 110 percent increase with 122,000 people visiting the site in January. Many universities across the country saw spikes in audience, with the Education & Careers-Universities sub category growing 11% on December 2015.

January was also a month for career development, with the sub-category growing by 14 percent from December. Seek saw a 39 percent increase to an audience of 2.2 million

CURRENT EVENTS & GLOBAL NEWS SUB-CATEGORYIn the Current Events & Global News Sub-Category, the top three websites – news.com.au, smh.com.au, ABC News – maintained their rankings by unique audience. Overall the sub-category grew in unique audience by 7 percent, as anticipated after the Christmas period.

Daily Mail Australia and ninemsn News switched rankings in January, with Daily Mail Australia coming into fourth position. Yahoo7 News Websites came back into the top ten in sixth position.

TABLE 2. TOP 10 BY UNIQUE AUDIENCE, CURRENT EVENTS & GLOBAL NEWS SUB-CATEGORY FOR JANUARY 2016

Source: Nielsen Online Ratings, Hybrid data January, 2016

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Press Contact:Jackie Helliker, +61 403 074 864, jackie.helliker@nielsen.com