Smh.com.au topped the news ratings in the second Nielsen Mobile Ratings report, bumping news.com.au into second place.

The latest figures confirm traditional media players are dominating smartphone usage with brands such as Google, Facebook and Apple outstripping local competitors.

For August, SMH.com.au had 1.257m unique viewers on smartphones and 746,000 unique viewers on tablet devices.

The Daily Telegraph dropped out of the top ten on tablet devices, after claiming eighth place in July and dropped to 10th place on smartphones from third the month prior.

ADVERTISEMENT

Recent Australian entrant The Huffington Post was again not on either list.

On the report’s second release Lisa Walsh, IAB research director, said in a statement: “Understanding which devices consumers are using and the combinations of their usage across devices can be really important for marketers seeking to design a total consumer experience campaign for their brands.

“This report provides a whole new metric for publishers and agencies to understand what Australian consumers are doing on their mobile devices, and is able to quantify the importance of mobile media audiences from a marketing investment perspective. We’re already seeing some very compelling data, which the industry can use to better reach their audiences.”

Early next year the Mobile Ratings Report will be replaced with the Digital Ratings Monthly which will fuse smartphone and tablet panel data with Nielsen’s home/work PC panel data and tagged website data in an effort to give de-duplicated audiences for websites across platforms.

The report, compiled by Nielsen and the industry body the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), measures web-based and app-based browsing and also gives a breakdown of unique audiences for the top online brands.

Google, Facebook, YouTube and Apple claimed the top four slots across both smartphones and tablet devices, replicating the results from the first survey released early this month based on data from July.

The report also gave some insight into how audiences are using smartphones and tablet devices to stream video, movies and broadcast media on, with YouTube topping both lists. Netflix came in third on both, beaten by Vimeo Websites while Ten’s catchup service TenPlay rounded out the top five across both smartphone and tablets.

According to the report, the increase in smartphone and tablet ownership is now plateauing with the smartphone ownership sitting at 15.3m while in the three months ending July this year there was a slight decline in tablet ownership to 11.2m.



Smartphone and tablet browsing time continues to outstrip traditional desktop, or PC, browsing time, with PC browsing time dropping to 39 per cent from 41 per cent in July.

Head of Nielsen’s media industry group Monique Perry said in a statement: “We are seeing that usage on mobiles is typically characterised by short, frequent sessions. The sessions are less that one third of the length of PC sessions on average, at around nine to ten minutes per session, but more than three time as frequent.

“Understanding which devices your consumers are on and the combinations of usage across devices can be really important in terms of designing the total consumer experience campaign with a brand. With this independent view of Australian mobile audiences, the industry is working towards a more comprehensive trading currency culminating in Digital Ratings Monthly.”



The report results are based on the IAB’s mobile panel which consists of 2,000 iOS and Android smartphone users and 500 iOS and Android tablet users aged 18 and older.

Miranda Ward