SA's online media space

At KUGM Online Marketing conference in Rosebank

Russell Hanly, Chief Executive of the new 24.com, gave us a brief overview of the new 24.com structure … and then talked about the South African online media landscape.

He emphasised that marketers should focus on domestic/South African readership rather than the total overseas readership, as this is obviously where their target market is. Russell also lamented the fact that the online advertising pie in South Africa is less than 1% — something he couldn’t understand given the relative size of the online audience and the quality of the audience.

Personally, I am not sure that Nielsen Media Research which compiles the Adex figures is reporting the online advertising industry in its entirety. The online media figure which makes up 0,8% of the SA media pie is comprised of ONLY 13 publishers. So not even all the 29 OPA members are reporting their advertising figures to Nielsen media. What about websites outside the OPA that carry online advertising? What about the Google revenue figure for adsense carried on blogs and smaller publishers in South Africa? This aint being recorded… It is something we at the OPA discovered during a presentation by Nielsen Media to OPA members a few months back. Surely there are more than 13 online publishers in SA reporting their stats?

Russell also talked through the Nielsen//Netratings tool, adopted by the Online Publishers Association for the whole industry, looking at the top news sites, news24, iol and mail & guardian online (thanks for the punt, Russell) — which affords the marketer advanced demographics and statistics that are compareable from site to site in South Africa.