Major sporting events drive Australian digital audiences to their mobile devices

Sydney, Australia, 11 July 2019: Today, Nielsen released its June 2019 Nielsen Digital Content Ratings tagged data. The latest insights revealed that the Cricket World Cup (Match 8 and 9) and State of Origin (Game 1) which were all aired on 5 June 2019,  resulted in the number of Australians accessing sports content online increasing by +44% when compared to the previous four Wednesdays². Along with audience, engagement across sports-related content on mobile devices saw an increase of +93%.

Nielsen Social Content Ratings also showed that Australian social media engagement for TV content increased by +367% on 5 June 2019 when compared to an average of the previous four Wednesdays. Seventy-five percent of total social media interactions on this date was driven by State of Origin³.

In June 2019, news.com.au was the top news entity with a unique audience of 10 million. It was followed by ABC News Websites (8.8 million) and nine.com.au (8.1million) in third place.

smh.com.au (7.9 million) was ranked in fourth position, followed by 7NEWS (5.5 million) and The Guardian (4.5 million) in sixth place.

In seventh position was Daily Mail Australia (4.3 million), followed by Australian Community Media Network (3.7 million), previously known as Fairfax Digital Regional Network. Next was The Age (3.5 million) and Yahoo! (3.3 million) in tenth place.

RANK	NAME	UNIQUE AUDIENCE	TIME SPENT PER PERSON (HH:MM:SS)	SESSIONS PER PERSON
1	news.com.au	10,034,673	00:28:14	9.1
2	ABC News Websites	8,824,340	00:33:27	8.1
3	nine.com.au	8,093,395	00:24:55	7.9
4	smh.com.au	7,896,523	00:18:01	5.4
5	7NEWS	5,463,945	00:04:26	4.1
6	The Guardian	4,469,058	00:20:48	6
7	Daily Mail Australia	4,318,423	00:30:02	8
8	Australian Community Media Network	3,740,595	00:04:10	3.2
9	The Age	3,529,896	00:28:21	7
10	Yahoo!	3,261,747	00:10:28	4.1

Nielsen Digital Content Ratings Notes:

• Nielsen Digital Content Ratings measures participating publishers only. 
• Nielsen Digital Content Ratings monthly-tagged data is now the independent IAB-endorsed currency. 
• Each month reported entities are improving their audience measurement coverage. For example, this could include new apps, websites, video content or off-platform content coming under measurement.  If there are changes in rankings or audiences it is necessary to consider that these may have increased or decreased due to measurement coverage changes, versus organic audience behaviour in the reporting period. 
• Due to an upgrade in Android mobile operating systems that resulted in third-party apps updating their technology a measurement gap was identified. Nielsen Measurement Science estimate that this change caused a coverage gap of 2% on average across all brands in Nielsen Digital Content Ratings.

1. Source: Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, Monthly Tagged, May and  June 2019, Sports Sub-Category, Text, People 2+, Census.
2. Source: Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, Average Unique Audience, Daily, May (8,15,22,29) and 5th June, Sports Sub-Category, Text, People 2+, Census.
3. Source: Nielsen Social Content Ratings – Total Social Interactions for Sports Events (May 2019 – June 2019).
4. Source: Nielsen Digital Content Ratings, Monthly Tagged, June 2019, Current Events and Global News Sub-Category, Text, People 2+, Census.