Most popular websites in South Africa

The top 10 most popular websites in South Africa primarily consist of video streaming services, social media networks, and gambling websites.

That is according to data from Internet traffic analysis platform Similarweb.

The company uses several mechanisms to measure site visits and unique visitors across numerous websites, including:

• Direct Measurement — Millions of websites and apps share their first-party analytics with Similarweb.
• Contributory Network — A collection of consumer products that aggregate anonymous device behavioural data.
• Partnerships — A global network of organisations that collect “digital signals” across the Internet.
• Public Data Extraction — An advanced algorithmic engine that captures and indexes public data from billions of websites and apps.

Using the different measuring strategies above, Similarweb found that, unsurprisingly, Google.com was the most-visited site in South Africa during the past three months.

It raked in 536.3 million monthly visits from 24.58 million unique visitors, accounting for 17.19% of South Africa’s total traffic share.

Mobile users constituted 63.3% of the traffic on Google.com, while desktop users accounted for 36.7% of visits.

Editorial credit: DenPhotos / Shutterstock.com

The second most-visited website was video sharing and streaming website YouTube, with 163.1 million visits.

Most South Africans prefer to watch YouTube on their computer instead of a smartphone.

77.3% of the YouTube traffic came from desktop users, compared to 22.7% on mobile.

Although it trumped the third-placed Facebook by monthly visits, YouTube had fewer unique visitors — 12.33 million compared to 14.99 million.

Two online gambling and betting websites — Hollywoodbets and Betway — ranked the 4th and 5th most visited, respectively. The latter had over a million more unique visitors.

Instagram and Twitter/X still beating TikTok

Other social media platforms featured in the top ten were the 6th-placed Instagram and 8th-placed Twitter, now called X.

Despite the recent popularity of the short video service TikTok, it only placed ninth in monthly visits. Its unique visitor count was close to YouTube’s, however.

The only home-grown website in the top 10 was Media24’s online news website, News24, which ranked 10th in monthly visits.

The table below summarises the top 10 most-visited websites in South Africa from November 2023 to January 2024, according to data gathered by Similarweb.

It is important to emphasise that although these websites are the most popular in South Africa, they are not the most popular websites with content generated from within the country.

The performance of these websites is tracked by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) of South Africa.

The IAB sources its data directly from publishers, who rely on Google Analytics for traffic measurement.

The only website from Similarweb’s rankings that also features in the IAB’s most recent top 10 rankings for January 2024 is News24.com, which has the highest number of daily page views and daily active users.

Other highly popular websites included Daily Maverick, BusinessTech, and The South African.

When one groups the various websites under their respective publishers, Media24 has the highest number of daily active users, followed by Broad Media and Arena Holdings.

The tables below show the IAB’s top-ranked content-generating domains and publishers in South Africa by daily active users in January 2024.