7News' digital grazers

Today, Nielsen released their Digital Content Ratings, which reveals that Australians spent 36.31 million hours consuming news content online for the month of December 2020, an increase of 22% when compared to December 2019.

Unsurprisingly, the Nielsen Digital Content Ratings report also shows an increase of 43% in the cumulative time spent with overall current events and global news in 2020 when compared to 2019.

Glenda Wynyard, Managing Director of Media Precinct, highlights the recognition of quality journalism transferring from other mediums into the digital world as of particular interest to her.

"What this information is clearly demonstrating is that a network like ABC, which is known for their quality journalism, experiences the highest time spent within the site but also the highest number of sessions per person."

Wynyard goes on to say, "If you compare 7News' figures to the ABC News' we can see the average session is only 5.6 x per person for 7News compared to ABC News' 11.6 and the average time spent per session is only 7.27 minutes versus ABC's 42.51 minutes. This highlights to us as an agency that the ABC's content is more compelling and they have translated their news offering across other platforms well into the digital environment whereas 7's news content lends itself to a news 'grazer'."

"It is extremely important for clients to understand the highly engaged audiences that sites like News.com.au, The Age and SMH.com.au have compared to many others. This is why campaigns often see these types of sites rise to fore from a performance perspective over other sites with a less engaged audience" says Wynyard.