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Cape Town - Valentine’s Day 2013 was quite likely one of the biggest news days for South Africans, with the tragic shooting at Oscar Pistorius’s house and President Jacob Zuma’s state of the nation address.
News24, Fin24's parent website, was the go-to news website of choice, across mobile, web and app, both locally and internationally.
The death of Reeva Steenkamp and arrest of Oscar Pistorius was the biggest local internet news event since the popularisation of the internet in the late 90s, said News24’s editor-in-chief Jannie Momberg.
According to figures released by Effective Measure, News24 and their mobile site, m.news24.com, attracted over 1.2 million unique browsers (UB) worldwide.
Effective Measure is a leading provider of digital audience profiling and measurement solutions in emerging markets.
The stories on the day generated nearly five times more traffic than its closest news competitor, which recorded 264 000 worldwide UBs on the same day.
There was also an upswing in all mobile apps across BlackBerry, iPad and iPhone across 24.com.
A breakdown of News24 stats for South African browsers on the day shows:
- 570 000 unique web browsers with 4.2 million page views;
- 385 000 unique mobile browsers with 2.9 million page views, and
- 282 000 active application users clocking 1.2 million sessions.
The top read story of the day was ‘Oscar Pistorius shoots girlfriend’ which had 502 000 web page views and 213 000 mobile page views.
The activity on News24’s social media networks also reached record highs.
Their Facebook referrals of the Pistorius story received 70 030 shares - five times the daily average.
Their first breaking news tweet from @News24 (BREAKING: Oscar Pistorius has apparently shot and killed his girlfriend after mistaking her for a burglar, police have confirmed) was retweeted (RT) 5 602 times, by far the most RTs the News24 twitter account has ever had.
Momberg said the News24 brand is well entrenched with news consumers.
"News24 has built up a reputation over the years in delivering the latest breaking news consistently,” said Momberg.
"The traffic on all our platforms reached record highs, but we were able - with some slight technical tweaks - to continuously inform our users on a stable platform," he said.
News24’s numbers also allows it to offer advertisers access to an unparalleled audience.
Gustav Goosen, CEO of The SpaceStation, the digital media sales agency that exclusively represents News24, said: "News24 is known for its speed and accuracy when it comes to rolling news updates.
"The platform is technically stable, able to handle high traffic and is available across both web and mobile platforms, which makes it the easily accessible and reliable, go-to place for news-hungry users."
He said the user demographics are extremely wide, but they all share the characteristic of engaged internet usage.
