Online awaits audience and revenue bonanza
By Paul McIntyre | smh.com.au | 27 August
The online industry has suddenly discovered almost 2 million more Australians are using the internet than previously thought, and will lay out the proof today with official figures from a revamped research panel at Nielsen.
Nielsen says there are now 13.8 million online users in Australia, up 1.9 million from 11.7 million last week.
Major online publishers have already flagged their intent to use the new figures for an assault on advertising revenues in other media sectors.
The chief commercial officer of News Digital Media, Ed Smith, told the Herald yesterday that two-thirds of the free-to-air TV industry's advertising volumes would be wiped out within five years as online distribution of video content became ubiquitous.
"If you go forward five years to what [free-to-air] TV will look like, it will be live sport and news, that's all," Mr Smith said. "Premium video content will be delivered by pay TV and [internet protocol] TV. If metropolitan [free-to-air] TV is a $3 billion ad market at the moment, there will be $1 billion left."
Other publishers were more circumspect about the online industry's impact on the TV business, although Wendy Hogan, the Australian managing director of CBS Interactive, owned by the US TV network CBS, said that even the latest upward revision of Australia's online user base was too low.
"I don't think anyone can argue that the [online] universe of 14 million is probably still underrepresented in some ways," she said.
Although there was some conjecture that several major online publishers would suffer big declines in their audiences from Nielsen's revised NetView measurement system, it appears all have grown their audience by up to 50 per cent.
Google will again take the top ranking, with some saying its "unique audience" - that is, the number of "unduplicated" people visiting its sites each month who use different work and home computers and multiple web browsers - could top 11 million.
Figures obtained by the Herald show ninemsn retains its top spot among portals with a unique audience of 9.7 million users, followed by Yahoo!7 on 7 million, News Corp sites with 5.5 million, Fairfax Digital with 5.3 million, Telstra-Sensis with 4 million and CBS Interactive with 3.3 million.
Online publishers contacted by the Herald said they expected the industry's 14 per cent share of the $12 billion advertising market to rise quickly because of the new online audience measurement system, with many citing Britain's 19 per cent share and Denmark's 21 per cent as targets.
"The main reason Denmark is at that level is because the industry says it's had a single measurement currency for nine years, which has contributed substantially to its growth," said the chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Paul Fisher.
"That's absolutely possible."
First published by Smh.com.au on August 27 2009
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