ALPHA Media Holdings’ (AMH’s) flagship title, NewsDay has been ranked the most popular news website in Zimbabwe by global website traffic and mobile application analytics site, SimilarWeb.
BY TINOTENDA SAMUKANGE
The latest Similarweb rankings reveal that NewsDay recorded 2,28million page visits ahead of Daily News’ 1,98million and The Herald’s 1,28million.
NewsDay — which has a print and digital version — is published by AMH, the biggest private diversified media group in the country. AMH also publishes The Standard and the Zimbabwe Independent.
NewsDay Editor Wisdom Mdzungairi said the mainstay of our success was quality and cutting edge content.
“We have elevated, within newsrooms, the understanding that a mixture of good journalism and data journalism works for us,” he said.
“Our journalists are now multi skilled to feed our platforms with cutting edge content.
“We are where we are because of adherence to a mobile and digital first strategy. “Quality content is our mainstay at AMH.” AMH digital editor John Mokwetsi said: “It is easy to overlook the desire and effort the organisation worked on to implement the mobile and digital first strategy over years. “This is the result of hard work and placing importance on the digital landscape that is no longer the future but the present.
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“I would be excited as an advertiser to know that we have a local website that hits 18 million page impressions and has a Facebook page that has 730 000 likes and a Twitter account that is so popular that it is now followed by more than 336 000 people.”
Mokwetsi added: “Taking advantage of the popularity of the WhatsApp platform, we have 29 000 people that we push content to on a daily basis.”
This is the sixth time that the NewsDay website has ranked top, after being voted the overall best Zimbabwean website, and the best news website at the second edition of the Zimbabwe Digital Marketing Awards last year.
NewsDay’s sister papers, The Standard and Zimbabwe Independent also topped the list ahead of The Sunday Mail and other several online news websites. In 2016, the NewsDay website was again rated the most viewed local news platform by SimilarWeb, while the AMH flagship title scooped the best Zimbabwean website for 2015 at the inaugural Zimbabwe Digital Marketing Conference and Awards.
The previous year in 2014, NewsDay 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 won the 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.
Technology website TechZim said: “The list has different statistics that paint a clear picture on the followership of the 25 sites, covering NewsDay viewership numbers as well as their statistics on popular social media platforms.
“Apart from being an interesting read, I also think this will help inform readers/businesses on the sites on which to advertise their products and reach the widest number of heads locally.”
