NineMSN posts 20% drop as SMH stays top of Nielsen online news rankings
Hal Crawford
NineMSN has called into question the Nielsen digital news rankings as “a meaningful measure of size” as the latest rankings reveal the website’s unique audience (UA) dropped by almost 700,000 last month.
The 20 per cent drop was predicted by the company for October after former partner Microsoft diverted its logout traffic from various services from NineMSN to its new MSN portal. Last month it had a UA of 2.464m, down from 3.129m in September, seeing it drop to fourth behind ABC News.
In a statement this morning NineMSN’s editor and publisher Hal Crawford said: “Unlike our competitors, NineMSN’s biggest news property – the homepage – is not included in the Nielsen news number. That undermines the news category as a meaningful measure of size.
Msn homepage is not a true news landing page. It is more like a portal for all content within msn. Also the majority of content on the msn homepage is not news related, but falls under other buckets like sport, entertainment, etc. Just because news is at the top of the home page does not make it a news website. In other markets msn is viewed and categorised by advertisers as a lifestyle and entertainment site.
Good try, Hal, but the ninemsn home page is the homepage for the ninemsn NETWORK , not the News site. Sure, it features some content from the news site — but it also features lots of non-news content from other sites within the network. The big drop in traffic is purely and simply because ninemsn is no longer getting a free injection of traffic from hotmail etc. Welcome to the real world – finally you are you competing on a level playing field with most other news sites (except Yahoo7 — who I think also get traffic from the logout screen of Yahoo mail users). Also, am pretty sure your figures include traffic from all of your news and current affairs sites (60 minutes, A current Affair etc). None of your competitors in the News category (again with the exception of Yahoo7) is able to aggregate traffic to all of their news sites eg SMH is counted separately to the Age, News.com is counted separately to any of the Other News Corp masthead sites.
NineMSN is going down the gurgler… and I don’t think they’ve hit the bottom yet. With such low quality content scale is the only selling point… so this is quite worrying.
The #1 position of SMH (for third month in a row) is all the more significant because SMH has a paywall, while news.com.au and many of its competitors (ninemsn, guardian, Mail Online etc) do not. The fact that news.com.au — with all free content — is coming second to a site with restricted content access should be a cause for concern at News Corp. Just goes to show that trashy content masquerading as news can only take you so far. Maybe news.com.au (and MailOnline) should go play in the Entertainment Category rather than News. They’d probably do better there.
Minnie – do you think smh.com.au counts the people who view the site using *cough* Chrome’s incognito window *cough* … not that I do mind … *cough splutter cough* but it would be interesting if that’s included no??
SMH.com.au has a paywall? Really? I’ve never run up against it and I visit the site every day and read heaps of articles, and have never, ever been blocked due to a paywall.
Are there any stats. on Fairfax’s Brisbane Times ?
Hi Christopher,
We don’t have those I’m afraid.
Cheers,
Alex – editor, Mumbrella
@Matt — the site has a monthly limit of 30 free stories and once you exceed that number in a given month you “should” be blocked from reading anymore and asked to subscribe. However, if you have cookies blocked/ turned off in your browser, then Fairfax cannot tell when you have hit the monthly limit of 30 stories — and hence no paywall prompt. And on their mobile site, there doesn’t appear to be any paywall in place??
Just pointing out that the Daily Tele and The Australian are, once again, nowhere to be seen in the top 10 rankings. And that’s despite the Tele revamping their site and replicating (read: copying/stealing) the Daily Mail’s popular Right Rail.