Daily Mail remains top commercial news site
The Daily Mail is Australia’s favourite commercial news website, attracting a unique audience of 10.643m across the month of May.
The only news site which attracted a higher audience was the ABC, with a unique audience of 12.835m.
Daily Mail’s editor Barclay Crawford said the result was a vindication for the publication’s “hard-working, seven-days-a-week team who treat a Friday night like a Monday morning”.
“It also shows Daily Mail Australia has become the must-read for Aussies who want news, entertainment and features from around the country and the world.”
Commercial? Yes.
News site? Hmmmmm
Nope it wasn’t your hard work daily mail, it was an algorithm change at Google, resulting in surfacing your articles more than others in people feeds.
This goes to show where the power really lies in audience numbers (to a degree).
That’s interesting. So Google prefers ABC then Daily Mail then Nine and then News. Why?
Sorry just saw this. Why? because they changed the algorithm to surface original content over stuff everyone is copy/pasting. This doesn’t mean quality, it could mean a “scoop” on some celebrity which probably explains the daily mail. It did wonders for The Guardian and ABC for their original reporting but there’s no quality control.
If you make a story “breaking! exclusive! *insert story about half truths”, not sure the algorithm will know if something is bull sh*t or whether it’s the result of investigative journalism. So really this a tough spot for Google to be in, small tweaks make BIG changes.
This may explain the quite significant change in rankings of all news sites, including news.com?
hey pal, it’s news.com.au
get it right next time!
What’s up with news.com.au? It’s been number 1 for years (literally) but has dropped out of the top 3 for two months in a row . Was at #6 in April. Am guessing that there’s been a big drop in ad revenue and as a result , to protect their bottom line, they’ve had to cut back on the (significant) amount they spend buying traffic
Those ads on Daily Mail are terrible. Interstitials from Tiktok which redirect you straight to the app store – is that even legal?
Surely total time spent and sessions per person are the more meaningful numbers.
In the 31 days of May the top ranked news site averaged 10.5 sessions per person. That’s about one session every third day.
And those 10.5 sessions totaled 43:02 minutes, an average of 4 minutes 6 seconds per session.
So the leading online news site averages around a session every three days for just 4 minutes. And it’s not commercial.
Compare that to the leading commercial TV news for just last week. Seven News reached 2.81m people, and averaged 1.164m people PER MINUTE across the seven 30-minute episodes. And that was just for the Metro stations which only cover around two-thirds of the population (so add around half as much again as a rough guide).
Put another way, ABC News websites were used for around 9.22m minutes in the month of May. Seven News TV (Metro) was viewed for around 244m minutes just last week.
Surprising? Thought provoking?
Agree. With such low engagement levels, those big unique user numbers are fairly meaningless vanity metrics.
It would be interesting to see the data for what was actually viewed on the Daily Mail vs say The Guardian and the sessions.
(My need to take out the sessions for cat vids on Daily Mail?)