MUMBAI: The 2019 Indian general elections result day, i.e. May 23rd 2019 was judgement day for news and information media across the country, as media outlets touched their annual peak traffic, both in terms of traffic and subsequent ad revenues.
According to the latest report by comScore, a leading global cross-platform measurement and analytics company, the number of unique visitors (UVs) accessing News/Information sites on their Android smartphone is significantly higher than desktop UVs, with Times Internet Limited ranking first.
The report noted differences in how users accessed these sites and their behaviour across devices, namely desktop and Android smartphones. Besides Times Internet,Dailyhunt, which was not featured in the top five entities in terms of desktop UVs, was ranked 5th with over 12 million Android smartphone UVs on Election D-day. The single day Android smartphone UVs to the top five sites composed of 26%, 17%, 17%, 18% and 25% of their respective monthly reported numbers in May 2019.
Besides the total number of users, Times Internet also led the pack with more than 28 million desktop page views and 152 million android web page views on 23 May 2019. Zee Digital has a disproportionately high android smartphone web traction of over 45 million views as compared to its 7 million desktop page views, while India Today’s 95 million android web page views were nearly 4.5X its desktop page views. This is in line with the notion of India being a mobile-first digital population, with millions of users accessing sites exclusively through their mobile devices.
The report also looks at traction registered by regional media entities. The top placed site in those rankings has recorded less than a fourth of the visitors to Times Internet on Android phones, showing that news consumption on languages still has some headroom to grow in India.
