WAtoday.com.au SCORES IMPRESSIVE FIGURES WITH INITIAL NIELSEN ONLINE RESULTS
Nielsen Online has audited the first official results for WAtoday.com.au, showing the news site achieved 341,887* domestic unique browsers (UBs) during July. Since Fairfax Media launched WAtoday.com.au in June, the site has significantly exceeded its projected UB targets. According to Fairfax Digital CEO Jack Matthews, it is already attracting almost as many UBs as thewest.com.au, which has been in the market for seven years.
“We are delighted with the number of West Australians who are welcoming WAtoday.com.au onto their desktops. We have over delivered on our initial projections and our launch partners are benefiting from the additional traffic. WAtoday.com.au continues to experience strong advertiser demand from a range of sectors including Insurance, Banking and Finance, Motor Vehicles, Education and Public Transport. From mid September there will be even more options for advertisers with cost per thousand advertising available in addition to sponsorships.
“The level of engagement WAtoday.com.au is achieving at this early stage is particularly pleasing; users are spending over four minutes per session on the site. We undertook extensive research to understand the audience and advertiser needs before entering Western Australia. These results demonstrate that Western Australians were indeed ready for a new perspective on news and advertisers are reaping the benefits of our strong and highly engaged audience,” he said.
9 Comments
a little embarrassing for the west considering fairfax doesn’t have a west based daily to drive traffic to it’s site.
Fed up on anon comments. Perhaps Campaign Brief could lay their hands on the Nielsen results for the same period for TheWest and PerthNow as a comparison. The July numbers for WA Today arent publically avaialable in Nielsen but it looks like both sites had significantly more UBs than WAtoday…..so I guess it depends on your definition of ‘almost’. Oh, and just a small matter of SMH.com.au and TheAge.com.au……one would think they would be a small asset in this situation!
10.17am
A little embarrassing to use “it’s” when you really mean “its” (nb for illiterates: “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”, the third person neuter of “to be”. “Its” is the genitive (possessive) case.) Please avoid similar grammatical faux-pax in future.
I wait to see how interested audiences are once the marketing budgets are all spent. Why? Because then they actual content and site appeal will have to do the work……the jury is still out.
I find it interesting that Fairfax have bought the domain name thewestonline.com.au and are re-directing this to the WA Today site. Anyone else think this is pretty sneaky? Maybe has something to do with the amount of UBs? I first viewed WA Today by complete chance after typing in the wrong address to the to The West.
The west spent years with a hopeless website and only improved it once some competition came along. First perthnow and then watoday. Just another example of how the west, with its paper, treats its readers with disdain.
Hi it’s Cindy Henderson here – I can understand why people like being Anonymous – many comments are amusing, most usually the controversial ones 🙂
Nielsen Market Intelligence results for last week are:
PerthNow = 156,839 UB’s (avg daily 38,229)
TheWest = 117,609 UB’s (avg daily 30,464)
WAToday = 90,353 UB’s (avg daily 20,143)
(Note these are national stats, Nielsen MI doesn’t give state breakdowns on a weekly basis)
And Carlo is right when mentioned other Fairfax properties which will assist in driving traffic. As do other News Digital sites for PerthNow. TheWest is really the only independent in the group.
FYI: For the latest state breakdown provided for the month of June by Nielsen MI, only 69% of TheWest audience were from WA; and 63% of PerthNow audience from WA.
Will be interesting to see the monthly stats for WAToday once available. If it lifts the category, making it more competitive and giving West Australians another opportunity for local news – overall it should help increase online activity in general and bring more opportunities for online clients. Bring it on!
ONYA Cindy! The engagement metrics make an interesting story also…
….and the engagement metrics for the w/c 4th August are:
Avg Session Duration
PerthNow 3 minutes 52 seconds
TheWest 6 minutes 47 seconds
WAToday 4 minutes 7 seconds
Avg Page Duration
PerthNow 39 seconds
TheWest 58 seconds
WAToday 1 minute 9 seconds
UB Frequency
PerthNow 1.98
TheWest 2.17
WAToday 1.59
So what does this mean? More visitors to PerthNow but TheWest and WAToday have a greater engagement rate.