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Stuff vs NZ Herald: battle for mobile eyes becomes closer after Nielsen fix

APN recently sent out a release pointing out that Nielsen had been undercounting audience to the Herald’s mobile site for about nine months—meaning that the battle for mobile eyes was inadvertently skewed in favour of Stuff.  

“Due to a coding error resulting from changes made to the nzherald.co.nz mobile site, traffic to the site has been undercounted,” says Nielsen comms manager Kim McFadden.  

“The nzherald.co.nz mobile site and nzherald.co.nz brand were incorrectly reported within Nielsen Market Intelligence from 30 July 2013 to 14 April 2014, [but]the correction has been applied and is effective from 15 April 2014.”

The Herald’s chief marketing officer Kursten Shalfoon welcomed the correction and pointed out how significant the difference was.    

“After nine months of incorrect reporting it’s great to see our audience accurately represented to the market. We’ve been heavily investing in our digital products and instinctively knew we were doing better than the numbers said. It’s satisfying to see the Herald’s unduplicated reach increasing by six percent compared to March 2014.”

While the correction has given the Herald a bump in the right direction, the publication still lags behind Stuff in terms of mobile visitors.  

For the month of May (which has accurate statistics for both publications), Stuff received a daily average of 121,273 unique browsers while the Herald attracted 103,398 pairs of eyes.

When the statistics were broken down into iOS and Android users, they showed Stuff leading in both instances, albeit to a lesser degree with Android users. 

Of those who visited Stuff in May, 97,000 used an Apple product while 76,800 used Android-powered devices. At the Herald, the split also leaned in favour of iOS, with 86,000 visiting the website with an Apple product, while 72,600 used an Android smartphone.

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