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SA Internet traffic (ABCe) for Q4 2001
The Audit Bureau of Circulations electronic (formerly ABIS) released the results for the fourth quarter of 2001 (October -December 2001) on 26 February 2002.
Note: Business Day, which reflects a growth of 7%, lost their traffic figures for October due to changeover in site management. Their figures were averaged over the remaining two months. Please interpret these results responsibly. An adjustment such as this will be allowed once only and back up procedures must be implemented to ensure the recovery of lost data.
While some sites showed the traditional decreases in traffic over the festive season, News24.com grew by 71%, due mainly to the Afghan war and coverage of Big Brother, while iol and IT-Web both increased by 20%. The financial sites, Business Day, MoneyWeb, Moneymax and PSG-online all increased their traffic in the period under review. The exception to this rule, Financial Mail, closed its site to all but subscribers, resulting in a 73% decline in traffic. The Recruitment sites, CareerJunction (-9%) and Job Navigator (-26%) clearly felt the pinch over the festive season.
EasyInfo had a torrid time following the publication of unlisted numbers on their site, and they and Webmail, both owned by Interface Media, did not submit figures due to an ongoing auditors' investigation. MTN also failed to submit figures for the quarter.
Some significant results emerge from the year-on-year growth (of Q4, 2000 with Q4, 2001)
During the past year:
News24.com's traffic, which increased by 71% in 4Q over 3Q 2001, has grown by 196% year-on-year
iol has shown a 97% growth rate
Moneymax grew by 89%
MoneyWeb's page impression figures are up 72%
IT Web has grown its traffic by 71%
CareerJunction shows a 61% year-on-year growth
Ananzi grew by 58%
Business Day increased their traffic by 40%
Moneymax has shown a growth of 27% year-on-year
Sunday Times grew 18%, and GetawaytoAfrica.com increased their traffic by 8%
Financial Mail closed its site to all but subscribers, and traffic decreased by 75% (-73% Q3 to Q4)
PSG-Online traffic decreased by 18%, iafrica.com by 10% and Job Navigator by 4%
These year-on-year results suggest that usage of local websites by South Africans has increased significantly in the past year, particularly in the news and financial sectors.
Unique users
Most of the sites reporting to ABCe now include figures for unique users. However, some sites are still experiencing problems implementing unique user counting. This serves to highlight the difficulties of obtaining accurate measurements of audience size in electronic media due to numerous issues. To mention only two such complications: proxy servers and corporate firewalls, which appear as a single Internet address but may represent the activity of thousands of users; and cookies, which are small text files placed on the hard drive of individual users, may be turned off or deleted by the end-user, so subsequent visits appear to be from different users. Furthermore, cookies can only identify individual computers, and cannot distinguish between multiple users on a PC. These and many other issues are under constant review by the technical committee of ABCe South Africa, and by the International Federation of ABC organisations (IFABC).
What's next?
ABCe's next step is to continue its goal of gaining widespread support not only from online publishers, but also from advertisers and marketers. To this end, ABCe is planning conferences in Johannesburg and Cape Town in July 2002 to address some of the practical issues involved in online advertising and measurement. The working title for the conference is: "The Internet is not the centre of the universe but it can add value to advertisers" The objective is to foster an understanding of the power of the Internet from an advertising and media owner's perspective and how ABCe can help with the dialogue between them. Topics will include perspectives from the media owners, advertisers, auditors and industry commentators.
| Title | Page Impressions Oct-Dec 2001 | Unique Users | Emails | % |
| iafrica.com | 17,880,764 | 274,947 | 2% | |
| News24.com | 12,807,006 | 424,408 | 232,947 | 71% |
| iol | 8,054,889 | 53,826 | 20% | |
| Ananzi | 6,396,793 | 138,409 | 984 | -4% |
| Moneymax | 1,684,366 | 53,762 | 1,751,861 | 14% |
| Sunday Times | 1,610,770 | 114,686 | 21,148 | -17% |
| Careerjunction | 1,585,136 | 116,458 | 203,524 | -9% |
| PSG-Online | 1,487,874 | 3% | ||
| IT Web | 1,370,020 | 27,918 | 792,904 | 20% |
| Job Navigator | 1,350,262 | 11,577 | -26% | |
| Business Day | 1,197,090 | 85,026 | 7% | |
| MoneyWeb | 1,089,873 | 86,466 | 270,775 | 16% |
| The Shopping Matrix | 721,163 | 44,774 | 96,000 | 36% |
| CARtoday.com | 701,571 | 21,679 | 72,169 | -17% |
| SA Active | 480,785 | 22% | ||
| Financial Mail | 164,766 | 19,649 | -73% | |
| GetawaytoAfrica.com | 154,519 | 10,740 | 13,739 | -5% |
| LottoManager | 88,681 | 6,195 | -8% | |
| Classic FM | 53,371 | 38,663 | -6% | |
| Steve's Auto Clinic | 22,839 | 4% |
Terminology used in the results:
Page impressions - A file, or a combination of files, sent to a USER as a result of that USER's request being received by the server.
Automated page impressions (Previously "Refreshes") - A PAGE IMPRESSION sent to a valid USER resulting from an automatic process.
Unique user - The total number of unique combinations of an IP address plus a further identifier. Sites may use User Agent, Cookie and/or Registration ID to identify unique users.
Hits - Are misleading and do not appear as a standard measure. Please do not use this term.
