The Daily Mail has experienced a 17% year-on-year decline in audience to 2.6 million unique users, according to Nielsen's Digital Rankings for January.
Its decline in audience, the largest among the top 10, sees the publisher drop from fifth place to sixth among the top 10 news websites.
News.com.au retained its top spot in the Nielsen Digital Rankings, growing 2% year-on-year to an audience of 5.4 million.
ABC outpaced Nine for second place in the rankings, up 11% to 4.8 million. Nine.com.au grew its audience by 4% to 4.6 million.
Smh.com.au retained fourth place despite a 3% drop to 3.9 million readers. However, the smh readers spent far longer on its website than rivals, an average of 1 hour and 9 minutes compared to 38 minutes on news.com.au.
The longer time spent on the platform means that each reader is likely to be served with more ad impressions. Nine.com.au also had a substantial average time spent per user of 56 minutes.
There was movement in the order of the next six newsbrands compared to a year ago.
Yahoo7 News websites grew its audience 25% to 3.3 million, rising from seventh to fifth, followed by Daily Mail (2.6 million, -17%). The Guardian (2.6 million, -5%), which had previously held sixth place in January 2017, moved down to seventh.
Next was the Herald Sun (2.5 million, +8%), which jumped up from ninth to eighth. Ninth and tenth place were tied by MSN News (2.3 million, +6%), which previously held eleventh place and BBC (2.3 million, -4%), which previously held eighth place.
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