According to Tiso Blackstar,
TimesLIVE (which includes the
Sunday Times) reached a record 6.5 million readers in South Africa in September 2019. This breaks the previous record set during election month this year.
Tiso Blackstar says that September was a very busy month for news in South Africa due to xenophobic attacks, the Amy’Leigh kidnapping case, the deaths of Chester Williams and Robert Mugabe and the murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana.
The group also reported that September brought record South African traffic to
SowetanLIVE (4.3 million readers),
DispatchLIVE (786 000 readers) and
HeraldLIVE (883 000 readers). In July,
BusinessLIVE (which includes
Business Day and the
Financial Mail) counted a record of 1.3 million local readers.
Comparing September to the same period in 2018, the group reports that
TimesLIVE's South African traffic was up 82.2% (in terms of the number of unique browsers visiting the site);
SowetanLIVE was up 127.3% and
BusinessLIVE was 12.2% higher. Within the
BusinessLIVE website,
Business Day rose 6.9% and
Financial Mail went up 61.8%.
In the Eastern Cape, the
HeraldLIVE website (for Port Elizabeth) was up 87.9% from September 2018 and
DispatchLIVE (in East London) was up 107.7%. Of these websites, Tiso Blackstar reports that
BusinessLIVE,
HeraldLIVE,
DispatchLIVE and the
Sunday Times (housed on
TimesLIVE) feature subscriber-only content alongside free articles.
"This gives our subscribers exclusive, high-calibre journalism to enjoy, while not ignoring casual site visitors' needs," says Riaan Wolmarans, managing digital editor at Tiso Blackstar.
Wolmarans says in the past two to three years, all Tiso Blackstar group websites have been rebuilt and relaunched on a state-of-the-art, custom-built content management system. This is with the intent to ensure healthy year-on-year growth, which holds benefits for advertisers as well.
The group says that all of its data was sourced from the Narrative.
For more information, visit
www.tisoblackstar.com.