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News Sites Attract 13.4 Million Australians In April Digital Ratings

2 minute read | May 2017

– News.com.au retains top spot
– Top six entities hold their positions in the rankings 

Sydney, Australia – 23 May 2017 (amended 30 May 2017): The Current Events & Global News subcategory reached 13.4 million Australians according to the latest data from Nielsen Digital Ratings (Monthly).

There was some movement in the top ten ranking but the top six entities held their position with News.com.au continuing to lead the subcategory with a unique audience of 6 million (+5%).

ABC News Websites (4.9 million, +1%), Nine.com.au (4.7 million, +3%) and Smh.com.au (4.1 million, -1%) kept their second, third and fourth positions respectively.

Daily Mail Australia (-8%) and The Guardian (+3%) held fifth and sixth positions both with unique audiences of 2.9 million.

Yahoo7 News Websites, including The West Australian, jumped three spots to rank in seventh position (2.8 million, +19%) followed by Herald Sun (2.5 million, -2%), The Daily Telegraph (2.4 million, -5% and the BBC (2.2 million, -12%).

TOP 10 BY UNIQUE AUDIENCE, CURRENT EVENTS & GLOBAL NEWS SUBCATEGORY, APRIL 2017 – Amended 30 May 2017

Name

Unique Audience (000)

Page Views Per Person

Sessions Per Person

Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss)

news.com.au

6,015

44

13

00:54:55

ABC News Websites

4,912

19

8

00:23:30

nine.com.au

4,698

34

12

00:59:21

smh.com.au

4,078

30

11

00:48:07

Daily Mail Australia

2,917

22

12

00:30:59

The Guardian

2,912

12

7

00:29:04

Yahoo7 News Websites

2,820

12

9

00:16:26

Herald Sun

2,457

19

9

00:33:17

The Daily Telegraph

2,360

13

8

00:25:58

BBC

2,235

25

12

00:47:13

Source: Nielsen Digital Ratings (Monthly) April 2017

For further information, contact:

ICON International Communications
Catharina Boer
T: + 61 439 028 285
E: cboer@iconinternational.com.au 

EXPLANATION FOR RE-RELEASE

On May 30, 2017, Nielsen re-released the April 2017 Digital Ratings (Monthly) data that was originally sent to clients and published here on May 23, 2017.

The re-issue was due to a data production issue that resulted in smartphone and tablet data for some websites to be under-reported for the month of April 2017. Originally, Nielsen had attributed the declines from March 2017 – April 2017 to the occurrence of Easter, ANZAC Day and school holidays. After in-depth analysis conducted by Nielsen it was uncovered that this was a production issue.

Nielsen’s Executive Director, Media, Monique Perry, said: “Nielsen found smartphone and tablet audiences were under-reported for entities containing URLs which were first observed in the data during a 10-day period from April 20 to April 30. The average unique audience impact to all 3,285 reported brands was approximately 3%. Of this, 287 brands were impacted by more than 10%.”

Perry pointed out that with the inclusion of the new URLs, all impacted brands saw an increase in unique audience compared to the April 2017 data released last week. In addition, sites with static URLs were not affected and all other URLs were accurately reported across desktop. Mobile app numbers were not impacted. There was very little impact to the total market line with no change to total online audience. Sessions per person increased by 1% and time per person by 2%.

Nielsen has now released corrected April 2017 Digital Ratings (Monthly) data to all clients.

To ensure this issue cannot happen again, Nielsen has put in place additional automated and manual checks to proactively identify and correct in the future.