Linklove

Which sites did South Africans visit for election 2009 news?

// May 3rd, 2009 // Analysis

( Note: Geoff, now publisher of News24 accurately pointed out that I made a careless sleep deprived  error because IOL and 702 was indicated by Nielsen in the exact same blue – so I am no longer surprised at 702’s performance and things look as they should be. I guess that is why Geoff is now publisher : ) – For the sake of transparency I have edited the post accordingly and apologies to IOL are in order. I have learned that if I want to establish myself as a trusted source I should take more care when writing posts in the middle of other real work and interrogate trends that seem extraordinary – as I would in my day job)

Just a quick post to reveal where most South Africans went for their election 2009 news.

I dipped into Nielsen//NetRating stats for an “apples with apples” view on the situation. (Note: The stats in this post refer ONLY to domestic users with local IP addresses)

Here are the results:

I was most not surprised by the web performance of 702 Talk Radio in the Primedia Group who in fact are performing better in general than iafrica.com – their online flagship brand.  This must be an exiting development to the group as a strong multimedia strategy. They performed better than all sites besides News24 – who were streaks ahead.

The results panned out as expected with the countries number one breaking news source dominating with almost 3 times the Unique Users of its closest competitor IOL on the 23rd of May – the day after voting.  On that day, as expected, all sites saw a peak as expected with readers wanting to follow early counting and results.

MG and The Times fought it out on the bottom rungs with MG pipping The Times on that day and then fading away further into the analysis stage.

News24 peaked at 310,000 local unique users which is truly amazing. I have not gone back and traced the trends but I am willing to bet anything that it is a new record by a long stretch. In fact for the month of April 2009 News24.com narrowly missed 1.5 mil domestic unique users by about 48,000.  The next ranked OPA site is 6-700,000 behind – which represents significant local domination.

I am not going to review the election offerings of the various brands but just wanted to give a quick snapshot into the local traffic over the period.

Disclosure: Elan Lohmann is the former publisher of News24.com