THE NewsDay website has been adjudged to be the most viewed local news platform by global website traffic and mobile app analytics site, SimilarWeb.
BY TINOTENDA SAMUKANGE,ONLINE REPORTER
The latest rankings reaffirmed the country’s top independent daily paper’s pole position both in terms of print and digital.
According to the latest Similarweb rankings, NewsDay occupies top spot in the country’s mainstream media, with The Herald and Daily News coming second and third, respectively.
International websites lead the pack, with Google Zimbabwe being the most viewed, followed by Youtube, Google International, Facebook, Yahoo, Alibaba and NewsDay is the seventh most viewed website, while The Herald and Daily News occupy ninth and 10th positions, respectively.
All other local online news platforms were conspicuous by their absence from the list.
NewsDay — which has a print and an online version — is published by Alpha Media Holdings (AMH), the biggest private media group in the country. AMH also publishes The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent.
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This is the fourth time the NewsDay website has been accorded top ranking, after scooping the best Zimbabwean website for 2015 at the inaugural Zimbabwe Digital Marketing Conference and Awards held early this year.
AMH managing director Vincent Kahiya said: “Our online audiences are important to us, hence, we have a deliberate bias towards tailor-making the virtual life experience on our platforms for the reader. I am happy that years of digital strategy are yielding positive results. The advertisers must take advantage of this traffic to market their products to this huge virtual audience.”
NewsDay editor Wisdom Mdzungairi credited the team for generating the high-value content that had helped the paper to remain ahead of the pack.
“There was always need for that paradigm shift that today’s journalism demands. We have aggressively sought that answer from the industry of our newsroom, which provides multimedia ground-breaking audio and video files. Our content has been our winning formula. Thanks to the industrious editorial team,” he said.
Online editor, John Mokwetsi added: “Nothing is as gratifying as knowing that our work is being recognised. We have more that we are still doing with the award-winning online team. The products that the reader will soon engage with are exciting and they will put us in a good position to cement our dominance in digital media.”
The latest statistics endorsed the 2014 Opera Software rankings, which also showed that NewsDay was the most accessed online platform on mobile devices in Zimbabwe.
In 2014, the NewsDay website was adjudged the third most accessed mobile online platform in Zimbabwe after Facebook and Google in Opera Software’s State of the Mobile Web report.
In 2013, NewsDay also won Telkom Highway Africa’s Most Innovative Newsroom Award in Grahamstown, South Africa, in recognition of ground-breaking content strategies that included live updates, audio and video publishing using moving screens.
Yesterday, Google Trends also said NewsDay was the top online platform on news searches against other news websites with a rise from 88% to 122% in the past week.
Technology website TechZim said: “The results highlighted some interesting patterns on local internet habits and if one looks at the 50 sites, one can notice some trends around international platforms being more prominent than local ones.”
