Nine rejects Yahoo7’s claim of being the third player in market behind Facebook and Google
Nine Entertainment Co and Yahoo7 are locked in a tussle over which media company commands the larger overall digital audience.
The argument developed after Yahoo7 launched its position for the coming year to the market, including its own interpretation of Nielsen data.
Yahoo7 believes its combination of skills and assets across content, data and tech will help the company stand out in the year ahead, with the digital company looking to solidify its position as what it claims is third player behind Facebook and Google in these areas during 2017.
Doesn’t MCN rep Telstra?
Just looking at raw audience numbers is hokum – they include people who may have visited these sites once a month, even for just a minute (or less). In fact for most of the traditional media players, most of their monthly online audience are these flyby visitors. The more telling stat is average time spent and on that metric, Facebook is far and away the dominant player. As for data: no one has more data on more people than FB (google would be right up there too). And content? FB Arr rapidly plugging that gap too with the likes of Instant Articles . Good for the likes of yahoo and 9 from aspiring to unseat G and FB – but that’s all it will ever be. An aspiration – they are both far too dominant (and by the way, latest advertising stats indicate that FB and G are together getting more than 100% of new ad dollars i.e. The group known as “the rest” are going backwards)
Its a little bit pointless, all of this d**k measuring over total audience. A publisher’s total audience only matters in so much as it helps service whatever demand exists for the product. An advertiser or agency would never buy the whole audience of any given publisher – of much more relevance, and a driver of actual demand, are things like audience alignment, requisite scale to achieve objectives and metric-based outcomes. The total size of a publisher audience is of much greater interest to the publisher themselves than the market.
It’s definitely d*ckswinging but as the local publishers seek to compete with Facebook and Google their total audience is relevant as they seek to demonstrate reach in key areas.
We recommend both Y7 and Nine/Microsoft to certain clients, where appropriate, and for my money it’s definitely cheeky for Y7 to dismiss more than half of their rival’s digital audience just because Microsoft’s sites aren’t “owned and operated” by Nine.
Reach is (almost) irrelevant these days anyway. Everyone has reach given the expansion of the on-line universe. It’s about the tech solution overlaid with audience data that counts, and how that will allow you to reach your overall campaign objectives. But it has to be said, the Microsoft Data offering far outweighs that of Yahoo hands down. It’s not about cookies anymore, it’s about subscriber base and Microsoft are very strong in that area. With the Microsoft data stack overlaid with third party data matching services such as Experian etc, the mi9 offering is far better than Yahoo.