The Evolving Newsroom

From John Drinnan's piece in the Herald today about BusinessDay moving under the Stuff umbrella, here's the latest NeilsonOnline uniques for NZ's business sites:

"Over the past 15 weeks Nielsen Online Market Intelligence counted the average weekly unique browsers to business sites. They were:

* nzherald.co.nz/business: 187,000
* Stuff Business: 136,000
* National Business Review: 37,000
* NZX (with some Fairfax Business content): 33,000
* Yahoo!Xtra Business: 30,000
* Scoop Business: 18,000
* Interest.co.nz: 17,000
* TVNZ/business: 16,000
* BusinessDay: 12,000

"Comparing the average audience over the last four weeks to the average audience for the four weeks ended August 31, NBR grew its audience by 102 per cent compared with 17 per cent for BusinessDay.

"NBR's average for the last four weeks was 44,000 unique browsers, in March it was averaging 12,000. BusinessDay averaged 12,000 over the last four weeks.

"Both nzherald.co.nz and Stuff have continued to grow their business audiences over the same period, peaking in the financial meltdown."

Foreign users outnumber domestic readers on UK news websites, according to research from comScore.

Media Bulletin reports that the Daily Mail has the highest proportion of overseas users, at 69%, while many others attract 50%-60% of their readers from abroad.

"Around 59% of the BBC's audience was international, with 27m of its 46m users residing outside the UK.

"The Telegraph drew 57% of its...users from outside the UK; Guardian Unlimited attracted an international audience of 56%; and Times Online had an overseas audience of 55%.

"The Independent had an equal split of domestic and international visitors among its 1.8m users, but The Sun's website was more popular with UK visitors, who account for 55% of its 6m user base.

"British Sky Broadcasting and ITV have a much lower international profile. Just 20% of BSkyB's 9.6m users were from outside the UK, as were 23% of ITV's 7.7m online audience.

Global appeal should be reassuring, although I gather sales execs balk at trying to convince local advertisers of its merits. I don't have figures to hand for NZ, but anecdotally I understand them to be similar. Can anyone point me to recent user figures for NZ news websites?