News Corp wins publisher reach race with 16.6 million audience

News Corp Australia was the country’s largest digital news and information publisher in August, reaching 16.616 million Australian adults across its network, according to the latest Ipsos iris data.

The result gave News Corp a reported audience lead of 2.9 million over its closest competing publisher and a reach of 78.1% among Australians aged 18 and over.

News Corp’s win was at the overall publisher, or organisation, level. The 16.616 million figure represents the combined reach of its news, sport and lifestyle properties rather than the audience of a single masthead or news website.

That network includes brands such as news.com.au, The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail and taste.com.au.

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Why the publisher result matters

Audience rankings are often reported at individual brand level, where news sites compete title against title. News Corp’s August result measures something broader: the total number of people reached across its collection of digital properties.

For advertisers, that scale is the selling point. A publisher reaching almost four in five online Australian adults can offer campaigns across several brands, content categories and audience segments while keeping the spend within one commercial network.

That provides News Corp with a significant advantage when competing for large advertising briefs against other publishers and global platforms. Reach gets it onto the media plan; the volume of page and video consumption helps determine how much inventory it can sell once it is there.

Across its full network, News Corp recorded an average of 143 browser page views per person and 83.9 million video views during August.

News audience reaches 12.71 million

Within the narrower News category, News Corp reported a combined audience of 12.71 million people across its news properties.

Those readers generated 510 million browser page views, averaging 40 page views and 52 minutes spent per person. The company’s news sites also recorded 67 million video views.

Six News Corp brands appeared within the top 25 news rankings: news.com.au, News24, The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and The Courier-Mail.

news.com.au was the largest of those properties, reaching 10.49 million people and generating 295 million browser page views.

The site recorded an average of 28 page views per person, which News Corp said was more than twice the engaged reach of its nearest competitor. Consumers spent an average of 33 minutes per person on the site, while video views reached 49 million.

Again, this was an engagement win, based on average browser page views per person. It should not be confused with news.com.au necessarily being the country’s largest individual news site by audience, a claim the release does not make.

Managing director and publisher of Free News and Lifestyle Pippa Leary said the result demonstrated the reach of News Corp’s broader portfolio.

“Reaching nearly four in five Australian adults and widening our competitive lead to 2.9 million reflects the strength and scale of our network,” she said.

“From news.com.au delivering more than twice the engaged reach of its nearest competitor to video consumption expanding across our network, we are consistently delivering the trusted environments and engagement our clients look for.”

Elsewhere in the portfolio, news.com.au’s travel section led the travel news category with an audience of 2.36 million and 12.7 million browser page views.

Taste.com.au reached 3.91 million people, recording 52.3 million browser page views and 1.2 million video views.

Ipsos iris measures online activity among Australians aged 18 and over across smartphones, computers and tablets. The Interactive Advertising Bureau Australia endorses the service as the industry’s digital audience measurement currency.