Nielsen has completed its first month of measuring a trial group of Australian mobile publishers in Market Intelligence, its site-side audience measurement tool. This is the first cohesive attempt at measuring off-deck mobile websites (non carrier related – i.e. Vodafone Live! or Optus Zoo).
The results look interesting, and will require some scrutiny in terms of calculating cookie deletion and unique audience – but is interesting to analyse nonetheless. The numbers are consolidated between devices (i.e. sites optimized for different handsets like Nokia or iPhone), they are not de-duplicated and the advertisers are currently limited to News Ltd, Fairfax, NineMSN (and Premier Media Group owned FoxSports).
I have summarised the first batch of monthly data below: ranked by monthly audience size and highlighting the stickiest or most engaging sites.
News.com.au gained the largest audience for April, with just over a million unique browsers. However on average Fairfax news sites The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age had more user sessions per month for a longer average period of time. FoxSports is the stickiest mobile site, clearly catering to sports nuts who spent an average time of 42 minutes a month on the mobile site (though there are only 33,000 of them per month currently using the site).
There could be some debate as to why Fairfax’s news sites are stickier than News.com.au (audience or content or user-experience) and why people spend much more time on NineMSN than News.com.au (more video content?). At this stage we can only speculate and watch the monthly data roll in and average out a bit more.
View the image gallery below for today’s screenshots from the largest sites.
There are obviously some big publishing names missing from this dataset, some who have large audiences (Google, ABC, Bigpond, CarSales.com, RealEstate.com.au) and some that are lagging behind in their mobile product in general (Yahoo!7). But it is a good starting point, and might surprise some people in terms of the size of audience and time spent with media some of these sites are not commanding.
Let’s hope that that more sites get on board over the coming months so we can start to get a less fragmented view of mobile audience measurement and invest appropriately in the medium.
URLs of the full list of mobile sites available after the jump.
