The Australian top subscription news brand

The Australian is the country’s No 1 subscription news brand in the premium market, the latest Nielsen Ratings reveal.

The Australian is the country’s No 1 subscription news brand in the premium market, the latest Nielsen Digital Content Ratings reveal.

The newspaper attracted a unique monthly audience of 2.2 million readers in August, unchanged from July.

The result includes off-platform audiences on some of the services operated by Facebook and Google in addition to readers using The Australian’s desktop, mobile and smartphone platforms.

News Corp Australia’s news.com.au remained the market leader — up 2.7 per cent to 9.6 million.

Nine.com.au recorded the biggest fall in the top 10 — down 6.9 per cent to 8.2 million. ABC News websites fell back 2.3 per cent to 8.2 million.

The Daily Telegraph and Herald Sun were up 1.4 per cent and 1.5 per cent to 2.9 million and 2.7 million. Published by News Corp, both newspapers operate subscriber-driven models.

Fairfax websites withdrew from the system in March and Seven West Media’s Yahoo7 portal is expected to rejoin after a change of ownership saw the site pull out.

The latest print readership statistics showed The Weekend Australian was the top-performing metropolitan newspaper in Australia, with an average of 598,000 readers each issue in June — a rise of 4.9 per cent from a year earlier.

The Weekend Australian reaches more than five times as many people nationally as Fairfax Media’s The Weekend Australian Financial Review, according to the latest Enhanced Media Metrics Australia data.

The newspaper’s business section attracted more readers over the weekend, up 6.4 per cent to 332,000 in June from a year earlier. In contrast, the Weekend AFR print readership fell 8.1 per cent to 113,000.