Online readers flocking to The Australian

The Australian has recorded remarkable growth in online readers, registering a 23 per cent jump in audience over the past month.

The Australian's award-winning tablet app.

The Australian has recorded remarkable growth in online readers, registering a 23 per cent jump in audience over the past month.

The official Nielsen audience snapshop of Australia’s news websites, out Wednesday, showed The Australian grew its audience in November by 451,800.

The average daily unique theaustralian.com.au audience over the past month was more than 207,000 — 2.39 million over the course of the month, an increase of 15.4 per cent on the same time last year.

The figures do not include the audience on The Australian’s app, which records more than one million page views each day. The data shows The Australian’s audience is also the most engaged of any other news outlet in the country, with readers spending on average more than five minutes on the website every visit. The nearest is the ABC at 4.2 minutes.

Boutique finance trade site The Australian Financial Review, the only other nationally sold newspaper, saw its audience over the same period fall, with the loss of 21,789 readers in November, a 1 per cent monthly decline. The figures show that each reader of The Australian online, a subscription-only site, spends a remarkable 24 minutes on the website, a level of engagement unmatched by any other news site except News Corp Australia’s news.com.au.

News.com.au has also grown 10 per cent over the month, cementing its place as the most popular website in the country. The site has a unique daily audience of 1.76 million, outstripping nearest rival nine.com.au and the ABC’s combined websites.

The editor-in-chief of The Australian, Christopher Dore, said the growing audience showed Australians were increasingly prepared to pay for quality, trusted journalism in a world of fake news and fallacious commentary.

“We relaunched our website earlier this year, showcasing all of our brilliant reporters, writers and analysts in the best possible way, and clearly readers have responded,” he said.

“We have shown that readers see absolute value in reliable, relevant, and often ground-breaking journalism.”