MSN News knocks Yahoo7 out of top ten of Nielsen online news rankings for December

So Telstra Media has fallen out…

Yahoo7 really doesn’t do much with Seven News for some good ol fashioned synergy!

Not surprising The Australian is falling, considering you need a subscription to read just about every article on their website. Obviously you are going to drive the average reader away from your site unless they are willing to pay (and most aren’t, especially when just about every other site is at least free for the first few article views).

we really should be looking at average daily audience. monthly audience is not relevant.

… and the challenges facing Yahoo continue to mount

I’m guessing MSN is the default landing page for Windows 10’s new Microsoft Edge browser, with lots of people buying and giving new Windows 10 computers during this busy period?

Totally agree “Media’s best beard”.

There is a pathway towards that with the IAB/Nielsen agreement, but the market needs to realise just how hard this is to do. (Yes, otherwise it would have already been done).

Server-side, you can get average daily traffic (i.e. average daily browsers) very easily, but with device duplication, cookie deletion on computers and sandboxing on mobile devices, the resultant number will be much higher than the true daily audience number (if it was known).

If you rely on a panel of people it is relatively easy to process the data daily (a la TV) but given that you can’t sample many types of businesses, government departments, schools and universities and public places, the resultant number will be lower than the true daily audience number (if it was known).

The ‘trick’ is to use a combination of server-side traffic to establish the nett volume of traffic to sites. This is then compared to the panel data to quantify the ‘missing traffic’. Conversely the panel data is used to quantify the amount of cookie deletion, device duplication etc to scale down the traffic data (and in some cases to scale it up for devices that attract more than one person). This is called hybridisation, which Australia launched several years ago and is at the forefront of developing.

The ‘issue’ is how to ‘hybridise’ the traffic and panel data for PC/laptops (home and work), smartphones and tablets, which is being worked on.

Then on top of that, how do you process all that data overnight and drop it on our desks the following morning.

Stay tuned for the rest of the year as the industry works on these steps. Exciting times indeed.

So did Huffpo’s audience go up or down in December? This story has two contradictory pars on this. Which one is correct?:

“Outside the top 10 other sites also saw their audiences drop away over the holiday break with The Huffington Post’s unique audience for the month down by 26.1 per cent when compared to November. For December the site posted a unique audience of 1.138m.”

“Outside the top 10 other sites saw growth with The Huffington Post’s unique audience gaining month-on-month, up to to 1.540m from 1.336m in October, edging it closer to the top ten.”