2. Audience
Website Visits
The increasing traffic to newspaper websites needs to be audited if the full picture of circulation and readership is to be assessed accurately. The Australian Press Council understands that the Audit Bureau of Circulations is likely to take on this role.
Newspapers believe the figures for visits to news related websites are increasing at a fast rate. According to Neilsen/Net Ratings, Fairfax Media main news and weather site had a 27.3 per cent growth in the six months to 31 March 2007 and News Limited 26.5 per cent increase in the same period on its main site.
NNR Market Intelligence Domestic publishes monthly average unique browser* figures that are compared over three-month periods. The table below provides data, based on the number of unique browsers visiting news websites in the period April to June 2007, and compares them with the number of unique browsers visiting the same sites in the same period during the previous year. These figures indicates a substantial growth in news website usage (with figures as high as 50 per cent growth) in the period covered by this supplement.
| Ave monthly UBs Apr-Jun 2007 | Ave monthly UBs Apr-Jun 2006 |
|
|---|---|---|
| smh.com.au | 3,194,207 | 2,138,154 |
| theage.com.au | 2,338,443 | 1,544,457 |
| brisbanetimes.com.au | 405,146 | N/A |
| news.com.au | 2,066,696 | 1,343,336 |
| heraldsun.com.au | 1,006,229 | 695,030 |
| theaustralian.com.au | 928,985 | 550,947 |
| dailytelegraph.com.au | 672,640 | 366,113 |
| couriermail.com.au | 432,156 | 264,878 |
| National Nine News (ninemsn news) | 3,578,676 | 2,947,233 |
Source: NNR Market Intelligence Domestic June 2007
Just as the readership figures have their sceptics, the apparently simple and reliable method of clocking of visits to publisher and broadcaster news sites also has its critics. The Australian Financial Review carried a front-page article on the opportunities for fraud when click visits are taken at face value, with some unscrupulous people repeatedly visiting particular pages just to ramp up the figures. This is one of the questions that may be addressed when the Audit Bureau takes up a more formal role in assessing the numbers visiting such sites.
* A "Unique Browser" is the individual calling card of every visitor to the site. Each time a user connects to a news site it is recorded as a unique browser visit. An alternate way of counting site visits is by "Page Impressions": the number of pages each Unique Browser looks at on a visit to the site.