Updated Mon March 24 2.31pm (Data now includes latest webstats as supplied by Mumbrella, Adnews, B&T, Campaign Brief, Inspiration Room).
Please note: This article is intended to provide a basic snapshot of trending traffic volume as supplied by publically available sources, it is not an in depth analysis of publisher content, audience, engagement etc.
There’s always a sense of irony about reporting on the people who report on you daily …but every now and then we’ll check up on the trends for local ad industry publishers in the digital space. This is not an attempt to compare apples with oranges on who’s reading what (eg: clients vs industry readership) but 2010 is shaping up to be a more interesting statistical battle traffic-wise with AdNews changing their model last month posting substantial gains in February (reasons listed below).
2009 was definitely a big year for Mumbrella coming out of the blue and scoring a lot of digital traffic with its blog format site. In contrast AdNews 2009 website numbers were destined to be limited because of their online model which only allowed access to stories for paid subscribers (although it saw gains to the end of the year when it discreetly opened up stories to email subscribers). B&T saw good digital growth in 2009 opening up for comments in posts and interestingly they appeared to somehow ride the coattails of Mumbrella’s traffic with notably similar peaks and troughs appearing in the traffic data below.
Campaign Brief and The Inspiration Room were kind enough to send in their latest data following, again showing solid growth online in the last calendar year.
Above: Alexa data for Adnews, Mumbrella, B&T
2010: AdNews website reboots with free content:
The graph below shows that the recently rebooted Adnews website (launched mid Feb 2010) has had an immediate impact on overall traffic. The new design a factor but the major change is that stories are now open to read and comment on without a paid subscription.
Above: Adnews traffic is on the up in 2010.
The Stats:
The stats below represent latest numbers supplied to our media team showing UB’s UV’s etc.
Web stats have now been supplied by each of the mags listed.
Mumbrella:
Update: “Quick update on the latest (March to-date) figures for Mumbrella shows 4,395 ave daily domestic Ubs and 59,101 total domestic UBs so far. This is a daily audience increase of 37% on the September numbers above, so worth mentioning. They are #2 in our Targeted Business and Professionals websites category.”
– Alex – ABA Watchdog (see comments)
Mumbrella – Feb 25-Mar 26: 
Adnews:
Update 26/3 – AdNews sent us their March (to date) figures below:
AdNews Website March 1-25
| Unique visitors | 25,694 |
| Visits | 58,661 |
| Page views | 152,836 |
| Impressions | 844,920 |
| Average Time Spent | 2min 27 sec |
B&T:
Feb 22 – March 24 2010
Campaign Brief
– Feb 23 – Mar 25
Inspiration Room
Feb 22- March 24
Summary:
All up, there is no bad news here for any of the parties above. Plenty of room to grow and an industry that is clearly hungry for online content and conversations.
Update: Comparison including The Inspiration Room and Campaign Brief.
Note: Alexa data is panel based. Actual stats have not been used to validate relative traffic as shown by Alexa on these additional sources.
Amnesia Blog 
Thanks for posting that.
The giant spike on Mumbrella traffic you’ll see on the graph, by the way, was when a story we posted about Murdoch got picked up in the US. I wrote about that here: http://mumbrella.com.au/shock-why-murdoch-may-be-more-right-than-wrong-about-google-11482 .
Mind you, delighted as I am that we’re well ahead on Alexa, it’s not the most robust data.
I’d love to see AdNews and B&T (and Campaign Brief and Marketing mag if we’re widening the net) join us in being audited by the ABA.
It’s not expensive to do, and certainly would bring a little more transparency to the market – something that B&T and AdNews in particular have been championing generally. How about it, guys?
But the point I’d like to reiterate is yours – everyone has a slightly different point of difference and approach, and that means there’s good news here for everyone.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
It’s always felt wrong that these mags can lecture us about audits (or in AdNew’s) case only let audited magazines win their mag of the year contest, but not be held to the same standards themselves.
Wow an agency using alexa data for analysis, embarrassing really
@hrm Right of response because in my opinion there is nothing to be embarrassed about when showing Alexa data – in this instance to show an update on comparison of traffic (this is not a white paper):
1. Alexa’s numbers are public for everyone to see and scrutinise. It is a credible source of data from a large pool (provided mainly by Amazon Toolbar) and used by many digital agencies especially as a tool to sanity check other paid sources.
2. I can also assure you that we used other tools to check that Alexa’s data held good in this instance. You’ll also see that Alexa stats also reflect the actual numbers supplied by each party so there’s no reason to assume the information is incorrect.
3. We do not have rights to reproduce graphs from other sources.
Thanks.
A bit harsh criticising using Alexa when there aren’t other easy alternatives.
Anyone got Hitwise stats?
[…] Digital agency Amnesia posted an analysis of the relative traffic from Mumbrella, AdNews and B&T. Modesty forbids me from sharing the results here. But you can read it on the Amnesia blog. […]
Where was Marketing Mag, The Inspiration Room and Campaign Brief in these graphs?
@david – Good idea. I’ll include a chart on that later today.
I still argue that traffic does not equate to the quality of an audience – we know how many, but we still don’t know WHO
Why do you not include Mitchells daily newsletter in this.
FYI This was just intended a quick snapshot of web traffic to these three sites – not intended to be an whitepaper or in-depth analysis of the whole industry.
Apologies if it looks like anything/anyone was left out – not at all the intention. It’s a big wide industry – we understand that.
If anyone is interested in us doing a follow up, post a note here and we’ll pull something together in the near future 🙂
Thanks in advance.
@eunmac
Quick update on the latest (March to-date) figures for Mumbrella shows 4,395 ave daily domestic Ubs and 59,101 total domestic UBs so far. This is a daily audience increase of 37% on the September numbers above, so worth mentioning. They are #2 in our Targeted Business and Professionals websites category.
It’s strange that these other sites decline to be audited. Media-buyers frequently ask us for their audited web figures, but we don’t have them, so these sites are missing out of plenty of new business opportunities.
Thanks for that update, Alexx.
It’s not Iain’s fault that our figures are a bit out of date, by the way – I think it came from our media kit.
Iain’s post has remninded us that we need to update our latest figures on the kit more regularly, particularly as you correctly point out there has been some decent growth.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
(and “remninded” me that I need to check my spelling before commenting…)
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Thanks for raising awareness of the ABA with this post – we got our tags up today 🙂
As an aside, I do wonder why more sites aren’t using Quantcast – they recently started providing global data including site ranks in each country, and it’s free to get “quantified”. While the numbers it gives us aren’t spot on, they’re far closer to the other directly measured analytics services we use (GA & Clicky) than anyone is ever going to get with toolbars/panels and guesswork…
Hi Alexx et al,
Just a two-second reply as I’m about to head out of the office…
We’re not (Marketingmag.com.au) actually “declining” to be audited – it’s definitely something that we’d like to do, and I have all your emails thanks. We tend to currently deal directly with our partners and clients who understand our “niche audience of marketers”, so they aren’t hounding us for impressions etc. at every turn.
Congrats to Tim, as ever, and good work to AdNews on the redesign.
It’s great to see we have such a healthy industry!
Enjoy your weekends and looking forward to seeing the updated stats.
Kate
Based on the last 30 days
The Inspiration Room has an estimated 760,800 monthly visits.
Mumbrella has an estimated 482,200 monthly visits.
B&T has an estimated 266,700 monthly visits.
Marketing Mag has an estimated 189,800 monthly visits.
Campaign Brief has an estimated 141,400 monthly visits.
AdNews has an estimated 112,600 monthly visits
Interesting to see that B&T has more than twice the online impact of Adnews and CB combined.
I note that CB is now promoting itself on its own site as the cheapest option for advertisers … no doubt because its audience is mostly compromised of junior ad agency creatives with axes to grind.
AKA online guru, what figures are you quoting?
According to monthly visit figures supplied above by both B&T and AdNews and figures supplied by Campaign Brief (Google Analytics) and Mumbrella (ABA) the order is as follows:
1. Mumbrella has around 202,408 monthly visits
2. Campaign Brief has around 129,444 monthly visits
3. B&T has around 104,960 monthly visits
4. AdNews has around 58,039 monthly visits
I would like to see figures supplied by The Inspiration Room and Marketing Mag posted here soon.
So in answer to Not saying, unless B&T themselves have supplied the wrong figures, you are wrong about B&T having twice as many monthly visits as CB and AdNews.
As to our ad rates, yes we are much cheaper: less than a quarter the cost per thousand of B&T, less than a sixth the CPM of AdNews and less than a tenth the CPM of Mumbrella, and our happy advertisers know we reach most of the Australian ad industry and TVC production industry, not just “junior ad agency creatives with axes to grind”.
The spiel about our rates is here: http://www.campaignbrief.com/2010/03/campaign-brief-cheapest-cpm-of.html#more
Hi Lynchy,
Thanks for your comments.
A key issue of course is who advertisers are trying to reach.
I note that based on the Google Analytics above (and why isn’t your site ABA audited by the way?), the sites have the following monthly unique visitors:
Mumbrella – 91,493
B&T – 71,481
Campaign Brief – 37,003
Adnews – 25,694
Also important for many advertisers is to reach an Australian audience. According to Alexa, the percantage Australian audience for each of the sites:
Mumbrella 86%
AdNews 85.1%
BandT 67.6%
Campaign Brief 51.9%
Inspiration Room 11.7%
So if I wanted to reach your 18,000 or so Australian readers, (who I would guess are mainly within creative agencies), then yes that’s a good, cheap CPM. (Assuming, of course, that you can offer geotargeting?)
However, Alexa is easy to game, and Google Analytics can be overstated.
So how about this: why not just allow your site to be audited by the ABA? It’s easy and inexpensive.
I’ll tell you what. If times are tough, I’ll pay for your first month myself.
How about it?
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Tim,
I signed up with Alexx Cass at the Audit Bureau of Australia on Friday. Yes it’s a good deal for small publishers, which in my case includes audits for CB Australia, CB NZ, CB WA, CB Asia and Bestadsontv.com.
Until those figures come through, I will stick with Google Analytics (not the notoriously unreliable Alexa), which show that in the last month CB had 88,790 visits from Australia out of the 129,444 total visits, which is around 65%, close to the B&T proportion.
A couple of other points – I emailed the following to Iain at Amnesiablog on the weekend:
Now you have credible figures from each mag (B&T, AdNews, CB and Mumbrella) don’t you agree those Alexa stats look a bit silly? They simply don’t reflect reality and should be removed.
All you need to get is figures from Marketing Mag and Australian Creative and you have the whole Australian trade press covered. It would be good if B&T and AdNews provided their stats via Google Analytics or similar. Or at least provide the source of their info.
As to The Inspiration Room, they are an international creative site with most of their viewers from outside Australia (more like our own http://www.bestadsontv.com) so should not be included in this Australian ad trade press analysis.
Lynchy
Good to have Campaign Brief on board, so stay tuned for their audited data at the end of April. If the other publishers decided to be audited it would be easy for us to distribute a free monthly report to the market for just the Trade Press sites.
That would remove any doubt about comparing AU vs International traffic figures as well as the other discrepancies you inevitably get from comparing non-standardised figures.
Good one Alexx… let’s hope you hear soon from AdNews, B&T, Marketing Mag and Australian Creative.
[…] comments from Alexx Cass, who heads up ABA’s digital audits, came after a blog posting from digital agency Amnesia triggered an unprecendented torrent of transparency among the media and marketing industry’s […]
Love it Ian… Great round up of stats on the industry sites. Maybe we should be comparing Digital Buzz on here too. Or maybe not appropriate seeing I don’t charge (or even have) advertising 😉 however, after reviewing these stats, I probably should!
Congrats to everyone, with out these sites, the local industry would be a little flat! Plus I’m quite enjoying the banter 🙂
Just about to add Inspiration Room stats. Thanks to Steve Malloy for sending these over.
I don’t think The Inspiration Room qualifies as an Australian ad trade press website. Like our own http://www.bestadsontv.com, it’s based in Australia but it’s an international site full of international content. According to Alexa, only 11.6 percent of their visitors are from Australia.
The stats were asked by yourself. Although our audience in Australia makes up 11% of all the site, it still ranks higher in Australia than most. Most websites should get traffic from abroad.
Steve,
Yes I did originally, but when I read Tim Burrows’s chart of Australian visitor percentages I realised just how much of The Inspiration Room’s traffic was from overseas. It’s not a local ad trade press site full of Australian content, in the same way as B&T, AdNews, CB, Marketing Mag, Australian Creative and Mumbrella.
I know you have a large Australian following, but your content is international.
Why can’t we be friends… why can’t we be friends…
Related to this topic we have recently released March data for the Top 30 Australian Targeted Business Websites (http://bit.ly/9Hwzwy) which includes Trade Press and Media/Advertising Industry related websites. Campaign Brief will be included in the April report and we hope to have Inspiration Room on board for May.
If you want to see credible figures for any other websites you are dealing with, simply ask them to be ABA audited!
[…] the last time the two trade titles made a public claim of online numbers, AdNews said that it has 25,694 monthly UBs. However this number would also include overseas numbers […]
[…] the third time I’ve posted statistical information on specific advertising industry publishers. The last time it stirred up a few debates in the comments with the Australian Audit Bureau weighing in to argue for greater standards of […]
[…] Amnesia carried out a similar exercise earlier this year. On that occasion, AdNews shared slightly more data – they included both their “impressions” of 731,705 and their page views – 145,956. (At that time I’m guessing there were just five ad slots). […]
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