Almost all the Web sites monitored by the Audit Bureau of Internet Standards (ABIS) showed growth in the first quarter of this year, with only news site Mail & Guardian and community site Mcafe`s impressions dropping.
"What ABIS figures provide is an indication of site popularity - we simply produce a statistic which allows an apples-to-apples comparison to enable advertisers to make media planning decisions," says ABIS chairman Mike Wright.
"One thing is clear, though - more pages are being seen in SA than ever before."
Mail & Guardian lost 17.7% compared with the fourth quarter of last year, but with almost 1.5 million impressions is still one of the largest news sites in SA.
However, news, sports and financial Web sites are still lagging far behind wildlife Web camera site Africam in terms of popularity, according to the ABIS figures.
Africam recorded more than 30 million impressions in the first quarter of this year, up 25.7% from the fourth quarter of 1999. Portal iafrica.com was the second most popular site with 14.7 million impressions, 13.2% up from the previous quarter.
The M-Web sites collectively recorded more than 15 million impressions, with the group`s Supersport site recording the third highest figure for an individual site - 8.7 million. This was 61.1% up.
On the news front, some of the biggest winners were the Sunday Times (including Business Times), which grew 159.4% to about 925 159 and Moneymax (87.1% up at 433 613). The largest news site, News.24.co.za, grew 37.6% to more than 2.7 million impressions.
IT news site ITWeb saw its impressions grow a third to 526 317 for the quarter. Moneyweb recorded just short of 400 000 impressions, but information for the previous quarter is still outstanding. Newspaper Business Day`s site grew to 727 280, 28.9% up.
More than 15 new sites reported their figures for the quarter. Among them, WebMail and Woza debuted with more than 5 million impressions each.
"In the world of Internet presence, size does matter," says Wright. "The value of your enterprise is closely tied to how you are doing in the battle for eyeballs.
"Some sites are showing major growth in their sector - which could indicate that they`re more effective in understanding their audience and providing better content and better advertising than their competitors."
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