Live streaming and big news drive ninemsn's Nine News to No. 1

PRLog (Press Release) - Oct 13, 2008 -
During the past month ninemsn has regularly live-streamed top (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/headlines.aspx) international and domestic news events that have helped attract an average of 10,000 more daily unique browsers than The Sydney Morning Herald site.

Nine (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/) News' daily audience has grown by 20 percent since the site was redesigned in April and now sits at 420,000 unique browsers per day, according to Nielsen NetRatings.

ninemsn's executive producer for News and Current Affairs, Andrew Hunter, said audience growth had continued following a strong month in August due to the Olympic Games. "We've had Malcolm Turnbull winning the Opposition leadership, Nathan Rees taking over in NSW, Hurricane Ike and the global market meltdown all in a matter of weeks." Hunter said.

"For each of these events, Nine News has been the place to come for the latest pictures, articles and live streaming video. Nine News is the only site to show live video of (http://news.ninemsn.com.au/) breaking news events on a daily basis," said Hunter. "For example last week we had the outspoken Sarah Palin in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden. No one seems to know what Palin's going to say next. But when she did speak, our audience could watch it live on desktops at home and in the office."

In addition to the daily audience increase, Nine News grew its total monthly audience during September while the other top news sites (SMH, news.com.au and The Age) lost overall audience.

This followed an 8 percent audience boost for the (http://ninemsn.com.au/) ninemsn site in August, according to Nielsen.

During August, Nine News served 40 million pages of Olympics content to 2.8million users, compared with rights-holder Yahoo!7's 32 million pages to 2.3 million users.

Nine News had a video team embedded with the Nine News TV production unit in Beijing for the duration of the Games and streamed more than one million Olympics videos and (http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au) sports headlines.

For further information, please contact:
Andrea Kerekes,
Access PR,
02 9279 4011
andrea@accesspr.com.au

Photo:
http://www.prlog.org/10128296/1