SA’s fastest growing websites
Specialist online publication Engineering News was South Africa's fastest growing website over the past year, according to Nielsen Online.
The site, published by Creamer Media, grew its unique browsers by 190% between March 2007 and March 2008. Engineering News' sister publications, Mining Weekly and Polity, took second and fourth spot on the list of fastest growing sites, climbing by 156% and 121% respectively. The Carte Blanche website grew 124% to take third spot.
In March 2007 Engineering News had 23 455 unique readers, climbing to 67 924 in March of this year. Mining Weekly climbed from 12 034 unique readers to 30 788 in March 2008 and Polity grew from 12 472 to 27 544 at the end of March 2008.
Alex Burmaster, Internet Analyst, at Nielsen Online, said that "with the focus on consumer media and entertainment, it's easy to forget that Internet is also an extremely valuable resource for the industrial and business sector – and this is shown by the strong performance of these sites over the last year. Sites such as Engineering News and Mining Weekly have grown at around four times the rate of overall market growth."
On average the market expanded by 44% in the same period, from 3,4-million unique browsers in 2007 to 4,9-million by the end of March.
Creamer Media CEO Kenneth Creamer said the phenomenal growth of its three websites was due to a combination of quality local content, an excellent technology platform and a co-ordinated strategy to increase newsletter subscribers.
Creamer said that regular communication with readers through email newsletters had been a key driver for the growth over the past year. He said the group had increased it output of daily and weekly newsletters by almost 200% during this time.
"I must also emphasise that this strong performance has only been made possible through a vital collaboration with Prefix Technologies, our South African technology partner, which has developed the tools and content-management platform through which we are able to deliver our world-class content," Creamer said.
Nielsen Online collects data on website traffic on behalf of the Online Publishers Association (OPA). According to the Nielsen Online the top site in South Africa is still News24, with 1,1-million unique browsers a month, 44% on the 782 835 achieved in March 2007.
MyBroadband is not a member of the OPA.
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