Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Yahoo!7 and other big players lose audience during Olympic period of August

New Nielsen data is out and it's big.

Yahoo!7 - who had the official Olympics presence in AU - actually lost audience numbers in August.

August 08 saw 5.35m Australia' s visit the site, down 41,000 from July.

This would be an annoyance to the Yahoo!7 management team, who rely on this Nielsen data as it's their only source of audited third party measurement to take to market. (as they don't use Market Intelligence)

It may also raise questions about the value of the Olympics to Yahoo!7 in terms of exposing the brand and their services to a new audience.

All of the main players took hits in August - ninemsn was down over 200,000 uniques, Fairfax Digital down 100,000 uniques, and News Digital down over 300,000 uniques. Relative to these numbers, the Yahoo! result doesn't look too bad ... but would still be a worry as it will raise concerns as to what the numbers will do in September without the Olympic traffic to pump it up.

It would also be a surprise for the other networks - who wouldn't have banked on them losing audience numbers of this volume as they enter the absolutely crucial back quarter.

All data sourced from Nielsen Netview, August 2008

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Shep - any data on where that audience has gone?? Did the internet audience in Au shrink for August, or have they migrated to other sites??

BTW - we saw growth across all our properties in August. Maybe this is the first stark example of the mid-tail capturing audience from the larger networks. (Is it just a matter of time before ad dollars start to really flow??)

Ben Shepherd said...

good questions sharpie

the total audience did shrink in August - from 11.658m in July to 11.383 in August - a drop of about 2.4%

Google also dropped, as did Facebook and myspace ... it appears most took a bit of a hit.