The Oscar Pistorius shooting effect
Effective Measure released its February 2013 website traffic statistics recently, revealing that News24 had a record month. News24’s traffic had a massive boost from its superior coverage of the Oscar Pistorius murder trial and events surrounding the athlete’s killing of his girlfriend.
Pistorius has been charged with murder after his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp was shot in his home on February 14. This event dominated the world’s media last month, and News24’s coverage was arguably among the best in the world.
News24’s website statistics showed that South African Internet users flocked to the website to stay up to date with the latest Pistorius news.
According to the February 2013 Effective Measure statistics, News24 attracted 4.5 million unique visitors in February, up from 3.1 million visitors in January 2013.
When looking at only South African traffic, News24 also had a record month with 3.2 million unique visitors – up 44% from January.
This strong performance is particularly impressive when considering that February only has 28 days, compared with January which has 31 days (more days means more time to accumulate traffic).
Other news websites, including Howzit.MSN, IOL and Beeld, also had strong performances in February.
The following table provides an overview of the top South African websites in February 2013.
| Website | Unique Visitors | Page Views | Website | Unique SA visitors | Pageviews from SA visitors |
| news24.com | 4,518,937 | 76,133,774 | news24.com | 3,177,403 | 64,948,536 |
| howzit.msn.com | 3,210,454 | 39,533,497 | Vodafone live portal | 1,802,968 | 24,371,625 |
| iol.co.za | 2,431,633 | 22,177,056 | howzit.msn.com | 1,696,297 | 27,208,772 |
| Vodafone live portal | 1,802,973 | 24,371,640 | iol.co.za | 1,379,800 | 17,154,511 |
| supersport.com | 1,609,835 | 19,326,023 | za.yahoo.com | 1,343,397 | 15,290,409 |
| reuters.com | 1,567,995 | 9,830,989 | sport24.co.za | 1,054,128 | 9,149,472 |
| sport24.co.za | 1,438,999 | 11,252,960 | pnet.co.za | 860,784 | 26,376,454 |
| za.yahoo.com | 1,438,603 | 15,903,168 | junkmail.co.za | 757,558 | 17,073,004 |
| mybroadband.co.za | 1,215,431 | 6,577,678 | supersport.com | 719,855 | 12,121,514 |
| timeslive.co.za | 1,156,000 | 6,920,982 | mybroadband.co.za | 690,414 | 5,471,000 |
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