The electronic division of the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC-e) today released quarterly circulation statistics that show near universal growth in readership for all major online publishers in SA.
Member sites reported an average 13% increase in the number of pages requested by their readers between Q4 2001 and the first quarter of this year, and a 19% average increase in the number of unique users accessing their sites in any given month.
The biggest increase was reported by search engine Ananzi, which saw a 47% increase in its page impressions to serve more than nine million pages. Finance site Moneyweb reported a 33% growth in impressions, to 1.4 million.
The Naspers News24.com and Independent Newspapers` IOL sites continue to vie for the top spot as general news providers. News24 was the largest reporting member, with 13.4 million page impressions on average per month from more than 500 000 unique users. IOL reported 10 million impressions, from a reader base just 3.3% smaller than that of News24.
Estimates are that about three million South Africans will have access to the Internet during the course of this year, giving each of the two major sites a readership of a sixth the available total. However, ABC-e does not differentiate between readers in SA and abroad.
The only sites reporting a quarter-on-quarter decrease in page impressions were Financial Mail (-13%), which made much of its content available to paying subscribers only, Cartoday.com (-10%), which was redesigned during the reporting period, and ITWeb (-10%), which was hit by public holidays.
Financial Mail and career site Job Navigator are the only sites to report significant drops in page impressions in a year-on-year comparison.
ITWeb sent an average of 860 000 e-mails to its subscriber base every month between January and March, with News24 sending 274 000 and Moneyweb 267 000.
ABC-e is in the process of adopting rules that would allow traditional newspaper publishers to count their online readers as part of their paid ABC circulation if the readers pay at least 50% of the print edition price for online access.
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