News.com.au has held its top place in the December Nielsen Digital Ratings, outperforming its closest competitor by more than a million readers, with a unique audience of 5.3 million.
Nine.com.au and ABC both followed with very close figures. Zoning in Nine had an audience of 4.268 million, followed by ABC's 4.203 million. Smh.com.au attracted 3.64 million.
For the month of December more consumers turned to the internet to visit retail-related sites, with all of the top four news sites seeing small declines in readership compared to October.
This was especially true for major retailers such as David Jones, which saw its site traffic grow by 50%) and Myer, which saw an increase in 31% in its audience figures.
Looking across all websites with a unique audience greater than one million, Westfield (+85%), Super Cheap Auto (+75%) and Liquorland (+60%) reported the highest percentage growth in unique audiences when comparing December 2016 to the prior month.
The Daily Mail Australia (2.7 million), The Guardian (2.6 million), Yahoo7 News (2.5 million), BBC (2.4 million) and Herald Sun (2.2 million) all retained their November 2016 positions in the audience rankings from position five through to nine, respectively.
The Age moved up a position to 10th place with a unique audience of just over two million.
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