Latest Nielsen Online Ratings figures revealed the online unique audience in Australia remained stable in April 2014 (17.5 million), in line with prior month. There were slight decreases in unique audiences to news sites and a spike was reported for travel and online gaming sites on the back of the school break and Easter/Anzac holidays.
March was such a big month for online news as consumers sought breaking updates about MH370, and other notable international stories attracted incremental audiences to the category. So in many ways, it was expected that April would not only normalise for the news category, but would experience slight declines compared to last month, as a large proportion of the population took extended holidays over this period.
The top six ranking news sites by unique audience remained unchanged this month and the top two maintained a strong audience from March. MailOnline, Herald Sun and The Guardian recorded growth in April compared to March, the only mastheads of the top ten news sites to go up.
Travel and gaming sites recorded a boost during April, reflecting the school holiday and public holiday period – especially Virgin Travel Australia (+37%) and big online gaming sites such as GameSpot Network (+15%), IGN Gaming Websites (19%) and EA – Electronic Arts Online (+44%).
Top news websites by unique Australian audience – April 2014
| Name | Unique Audience (000) | Page Views Per Person | Sessions Per Person | Time Per Person (hh:mm:ss) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
news.com.au |
3,675 |
57 |
13.33 |
01:28:58 |
|
smh.com.au |
3,608 |
33 |
9.76 |
01:06:12 |
|
ninemsn News Websites |
3,179 |
25 |
11.56 |
00:40:25 |
|
Yahoo!7 News Websites |
2,646 |
17 |
7.45 |
00:24:56 |
|
ABC News Websites |
2,308 |
28 |
9.73 |
00:38:43 |
|
MailOnline |
2,177 |
15 |
6.39 |
00:37:50 |
|
Herald Sun |
2,031 |
27 |
9.30 |
00:49:19 |
|
The Age |
2,018 |
41 |
11.61 |
01:07:31 |
|
The Guardian |
1,765 |
14 |
5.48 |
00:28:01 |
|
BBC |
1,629 |
27 |
6.90 |
00:46:06 |
Source: Nielsen Online Ratings, Hybrid data April 2014.
