Earlier this year, Seven West Media launched The Nightly, a free-to-read evening digital newspaper aimed at a national audience.
The paper has been tipped as a means for billionaire chair Kerry Stokes to expand his influence beyond the West Australian media market and into the east coast.
The media tycoon enjoys complete dominance of WA, where he owns the only major newspaper, more than 20 community papers, and free news website PerthNow, as well as the Seven Network television and digital assets.
The digital newspaper concept, which is released (as the name suggests) in the evenings rather than the morning, was backed by three billionaires: Harvey Norman CEO Katie Page, Mineral Resources chair Chris Ellison, and Hancock Prospecting executive chair Gina Rinehart.
In February, then editor-in-chief Anthony De Ceglie said the aim of the publication was to “disrupt the east coast market with a focus on mainstream middle, commonsense journalism”, with a worldview that would be “economically conservative [and] socially progressive”.
Last month Seven West crowed about The Nightly’s speedy ascent up the Australian news website rankings by audience size according to Ipsos data.
“Just seven months after it launched, The Nightly now sits just below The Australian on the news website rankings, and several places higher than The Australian Financial Review,” the release said, with The Nightly reaching an audience of 2.84 million people in August, up 8.7% from July.
Nightly editor Sarah-Jane Tasker said the numbers reflected that “readers are growing increasingly loyal to the nightly news drop. It sets the agenda, publishing front pages hours before other newspapers land around the country”. De Ceglie’s replacement as editor-in-chief, Chris Dore, said he’s sure even the prime minister reads The Nightly.
But does Seven West’s darling new website actually have the “increasingly loyal” audience it says it does?
While The Nightly’s Ipsos performance shows the paper doing well by one metric, other metrics provide a fuller picture of how audiences are engaging with the outlet. Third-party analytics services suggest that readers arriving on the site click away without staying to look at other content at a rate far higher than comparable publications. The vast majority of the people who come from social media to read The Nightly have been directed from places other than the digital newspaper’s own underdeveloped social media following.
Bounce rate is a measure of the proportion of visitors to a website who immediately leave after clicking through. The lower the bounce rate, the better job a website is doing to convince people to hang around and read more articles.
Per Similarweb, while fellow free news site news.com.au had a bounce rate in September of 40.64%, The Nightly’s bounce rate was 68.94% (other analytics services have this figure much higher — Semrush pegs The Nightly’s bounce rate for September at 91.2%). This means at least two-thirds of visitors immediately left. According to Similarweb, the ABC had a bounce rate of 46.78%, while 9News sat at 57.43%. 7News was at 60.73%. The Nightly also lags compared to its self-described rivals: the AFR sat at 58.91%, while The Australian was at 47.28%.
The disparity between third-party analytics services is because the companies calculate these metrics based on data they receive from their unique sources, like users who have agreed to have their web browsing tracked. This data is less accurate than first party data — like The Nightly has on its own website — but its value is in relative comparisons between outlets. We asked Seven West for its internal analytics for accuracy’s sake, but it did not provide them.
The Nightly readers are also spending less time reading the website than the newspaper’s stated rivals. Similarweb statistics for September show The Nightly’s average visit duration was one minute and 24 seconds, compared to the AFR’s two minutes 41 seconds and The Australian’s four minutes 29 seconds.
Dore pointed out to Crikey that both the Financial Review and The Australian benefit in these metrics as they are “both fully locked subscription sites”.
“One benefit of charging customers to access your site is they are consequently more likely to consume more content while on the site,” Dore said.
The Nightly readers also spend less time on the website than on other free news websites. News.com.au had an average visit duration in September of four minutes 14 seconds, while the ABC sat at three minutes 39 seconds. 9News’ website had an average of two minutes 21 seconds, while 7News’ average had a figure more comparable to its stablemate at one minute 56 seconds.
Free news websites like the Nightly often get a lot of traffic from their links posted on social media platforms like Facebook or X. This can be an indicator of a loyal audience who’ve chosen to follow the digital news publication’s accounts.
About a quarter of The Nightly’s online traffic comes from social media, according to Similarweb. Dore noted that this is a “relatively small share of audience for that source compared with other major news sites”.
A BuzzSumo analysis shows that the vast bulk of The Nightly’s referrals come from Facebook accounts other than The Nightly’s own. Seven West-owned Facebook pages such as 7News in the capital cities link out to The Nightly consistently, helping The Nightly gain traffic by using the company’s more established media brands. PerthNow and The West Australian promotes The Nightly as much as they do themselves.
To this, Dore said: “Naturally we are going to deploy all of our assets to help promote awareness of the brand and to help our content reach as broad an audience as possible.”
Syndicating content from partner organisations has been a significant part of The Nightly’s content strategy, with a significant proportion of its content coming from outside its own relatively small team (The Nightly has 11 associated employees listed on LinkedIn, compared to The West’s 330). Content from Seven West media brands, including paywalled content from The West Australian, is available on The Nightly’s website for free, as is content from paywalled, premium international publications The New York Times and The Washington Post. This may explain why audiences are clicking on The Nightly, particularly when it comes to international news stories
Dore told Crikey that it was not uncommon for news websites to “lean on publishing partners and wires for content and then curate it for their audiences”, and The Nightly was “no different”. He said that The New York Times and The Washington Post were not “significant sources, relatively, of traffic to The Nightly. The Nightly staff and contributors overwhelmingly drive the majority of our traffic.”
While Dore’s predecessor De Ceglie said on launch the publication would have a “socially progressive” editorial direction, the opinion section of The Nightly hasn’t reflected that. Alongside a swathe of high-profile contributors (including Dore himself with his signature column “The Front Dore”, perhaps a play on The Australian Financial Review’s “Rear Window” column), the opinion section of The Nightly has published editorial pieces recently describing independent WA Senator Fatima Payman as “ego-driven” and “cynical”, calling for lower government spending and opining that “the West’s goal must be to ensure an Israeli victory” in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
Over the past fortnight, the only politician contributors have been Coalition members. Other contributors to The Nightly have included a number of high-profile Seven West personalities including former Sunrise host David Koch, senior journalists Mark Riley and Michael Usher, as well as the London-based former Age and Sydney Morning Herald Australian politics reporter Latika Bourke.
As Seven West Media’s stock price continues to fall (as of closing on October 13, it sits at $0.17, down 26% from the February launch of The Nightly when it sat at $0.23) so too might its influence. Despite what the press releases say.
