Online Media News South Africa

SA's fastest growing websites - Nielsen Online

LONDON: The fastest growing South African websites over the last year and the most popular sites today were revealed by Nielsen Online, a service of The Nielsen Company, earlier this week. Right at the top is Creamer Media, producing three of the four fastest growing sites - Engineering News, Mining Weekly and Polity.

Engineering News was the fastest growing website in SA over the last year, growing by 190% from 23 455 Unique browsers in March 2007 to 67 924 in March 2008. The overall market has grown by 44% in the same period, 3.4 million to 4.9 million UBs.

Creamer Media CEO Kenneth Creamer says the phenomenal growth of its three websites was due to a combination of being able to deliver high quality, real time news and insight into the key industrial and mining sectors, as well as a strong commitment to fully exploiting both the text-based and multimedia opportunities that online publishing was presenting.

Creamer is particularly pleased with the performance of Polity, given its social dimension underpinned by its mission of "deepening democracy through access to information.”

"I must also emphasise that this strong performance has only been made possible through a vital collaboration with Prefix Technologies, our South African technology partner, which has developed the tools and content-management platform through which we are able to deliver our world-class content," Creamer adds.

Alex Burmaster, Internet analyst at Nielsen Online, comments, “With the focus on consumer media and entertainment, it's easy to forget that Internet is also an extremely valuable resource for the industrial and business sector - and this is shown by the strong performance of these sites over the last year. Sites such as Engineering News and Mining Weekly have grown at around four times the rate of overall market growth.”

Fastest Growing South African Websites*: Mar 2007 - Mar 2008

RankWebsite*% Unique browsers growth since Mar 07Unique browsers Mar 07Unique browsers Mar 08Publisher
1Engineering News190%23 45567 924Creamer Media
2Mining Weekly156%12 03430 788Creamer Media
3Carte Blanche124%6 02413 488Electronic Media Network
4Polity121%12 47227 544Creamer Media
5Mineweb115%5 48411 794Moneyweb Holdings
6SuperSport103%143 340290 290SuperSport Zone
7SundayWorld102%12 23424 721Johncom
8Sowetan100%50 933101 890Johncom
9The Post92%4 0327 742Independent Online
10SuperSchools82%7 13112 945SuperSport Zone

Source: Nielsen Online, ZA Market Intelligence, Mar 07 - Mar 08. *Min requirement = 1,000 Unique browsers Mar 07
E.g. Engineering News had 68,000 Unique browsers in Mar 08, 190% more than in Mar 07.

The most popular South African websites:

  • News24 remains the most popular South African website with over 1.1 million Unique browsers in March 2008
  • Of the 10 most popular websites with comparable data last year, only SuperSport (103%) and Yellow Pages (51%) have a growth rate above overall market growth (44%)

Most popular South African Websites: Mar 2008

RankWebsite*Unique browsers Mar 08Unique browsers Mar 07% Unique browsers growth since Mar 07Publisher
1 news241 127 796782 83544% Media24
2 MSN747 371-- MSN
3 MWeb618 133578 1397% MWEB
4 Webmail599 584503 79319% Interface
5 Hotmail597 854-- MSN
6 iol585 374509 42215% Independent Online
7 24.com518 903-- Media24
8 CareerJunction310 710231 13634% CareerJunction
9 SuperSport290 290143 340103% SuperSport Zone
10 Yellow Pages262 340174 22051% Yellow Pages South Africa

Source: Nielsen Online, ZA Market Intelligence.
Eg news24 had 1.1 million Unique browsers in Mar 08, 44% more than in Mar 07

“The leading sites are dominated by news and email services - they remain the pillars of Internet society. All the leading players have experienced growth over the last year but it's interesting to see that only two, SuperSport and Yellow Pages, have a growth rate higher than overall market growth. The market is certainly becoming more competitive, illustrated by the fact that only two publishers, MSN and Media24, have more than one site in the top 10,” concludes Burmaster.

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