SA's fastest growing websites

Alastair Otter

Alastair Otter is a senior journalist at MyBroadband, and focuses on software and hardware. He has a particular love for Open Source Software (OSS)...

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South African media giant Avusa is making its mark on the online publishing world with four of its its publications in the five fastest-growing websites of 2008.

The group’s Sunday World, Dispatch, Sowetan and The Herald fill four out of the top five spots in the Online Publishers Association’s (OPA) rapidly-growing websites for 2008.

At the top of the list is Sunday World which increased its online readership by 187% over the course of 2008 climbing from 14 284 unique readers in December 2007 to 40 940 unique readers in December 2008.

Close on its heels was the Dispatch, another Avusa-owned publication with an annual growth rate of more than 180%. Dispatch climbed from 17 598 unique readers in December 2007 to 49 414 in December 2008.

RealEstateWeb, a MoneyWeb publication, took third spot and was the only non-Avusa publication in the top five. It racked up a 91% increase in unique readers in the same period, climbing from 11 029 in December 2007 to 21 019 a year later.

Growth in the overall online publishing market was equally impressive over 2008, increasing from 3.7 million unique browsers at the end of 2007 to 4.7 million in December 2008. Page impressions also climbed by around 25% from 185 million impressions in December 2007 to 232 million in December 2008.

The ten fastest growing websites of 2008 according to the OPA were:

1 – Sunday World (187% growth)
2 – Dispatch (181%)
3 – RealEstateWeb (91%)
4 – Sowetan (79%)
5 – The Herald (77%)
6 – Yellow Pages (71%)
7 – Food24 (68%)
8 – MoneyWeb (50%)
9 – Landbou (48%)
10 – SuperSport (45%)

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