Nielsen data and analysis points to a lack of loyalty amongst Australian consumers to any one news provider, with nearly three-quarters (71%) of visitors to Fairfax Digital Media's news websites in September 2009 also visiting News Digital Media, and 69 percent of visitors to ninemsn's National Nine News website visited news websites of Fairfax Digital Media.
"Traditionally, newspapers gave rise to strong brand loyalty amongst their readership, and a person who spent their money buying the Sydney Morning Herald was unlikely to also buy The Daily Telegraph and vice versa," states Mark Higginson, Director of Analytics, Nielsen. "However, this model has definitely not been replicated in the online space. Consumers of news are not brand loyal, they are interested in the timeliness of breaking news and multiple opinions and reporting on news events and as a result we see a very high overlap of audience between the news publishers in
Australia."
The Nielsen data supports the opinion of ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott, who said in apresentation on the future of media in Melbourne this week that the ABC would never charge for content and observed that the power had shifted into the hands of audiences.
"For a single provider to introduce a paid-for content model, the end result would most likely be that the provider would be taken out of the competitive mix as consumers looked to other sites for their news, rather than driving loyalty to that one provider," Higginson observed.
