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Week of April 23, 2018

Big news brands lead web traffic, even in bad weather
ad agency creates internet interest

The onward march of online media this century is watched by many, not least by the happy advertising people. Certainly, they have worries, client stress over brand safety at the top. But that audience keeps growing.

Of the 60 Italian online portals measured by Audiweb/Nielsen for February and aggregated by primaonline.it (April 20) more than half showed double-digit growth year on year, ten percent triple-digit growth. Less than one-quarter lost traffic one year on. Those at the top were the best known Italian news brands; La Repubblica, TGCom24, and Corriere della Sera each saw daily traffic over a million persons. (See more about online media here)

Obviously, there were many reasons in February for Italians to stay inside and surf the web. The weather was terrible and so were election campaigns. Plus there were the Winter Olympic Games. For the month 34.2 million Italians over age 2, 62.4% of the population, were web-bound. In the average day 13 million did their web business exclusively with a mobile device. (See more about media in Italy here)

Online portals in Italy, as elsewhere, run the publishing spectrum from general interest and sports to every conceivable speciality. Caffeina.com, the website of digital ad agency Caffeina Media, was distinguished by its traffic growing 235% year on year, to 111,000 daily visitors.

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