Australians’ thirst for online news has soared this year, with Nielsen Research showing continuous increases in news consumption across all media.
It is consistent with the research about radio consumption on digital platforms during the pandemic, which has also grown.
News consumption hours in 2020 increased significantly compared to last year.
With two months of the year still remaining, year-to-date, Australians are spending an average of 46% more time reading online news each month when compared to the same time last year, according to Nielsen’s Digital Content Ratings for October.
The November data released this week, reveals that Australians spent 40.4 million hours consuming news content online for the month of November 2020, an increase of 37% when compared to the same month last year.
Australians spent 10.8 million hours consuming news content online throughout the first week of November, when the 2020 US Federal Election played out. This was a 16% increase when compared to the year-to-date average and the highest weekly engagement since early April.
ABC News Websites retained the top position in the online news consumption category in November, with a unique audience of 12.3 million for the month of November 2020.
News.com.au ranked second with a unique audience of 11.1 million, followed by nine.com.au in third position with a unique audience of 10.5 million. smh.com.au moved up two places to fourth position with a unique audience of 10.2 million, followed by 7NEWS with a unique audience of 9.5 million.
Although November was a shorter month than October, six of the top ten news websites saw a month-on-month increase in unique audience
Talking to Peter Saxon this week after the latest ratings results, Nine Radio’s Greg Byrnes highlighted the thirst for news during the pandemic as one of the reasons for the growth of talk stations this year. Read that report here.
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