NEWS programs remain popular among Canberra’s television audience, with five of this week’s top 20 programs news focused, but numbers could falter as more and more people turn online for their news fix. 

Nielsen’s Online Ratings for August showed the ABC news website was the big winner for month-on-month increases, no doubt helped by the Vote Compass tool that had over 1.3m responses.

The ABC news site had an increase in the total number of monthly unique visitors of 460,000 people, going from 1.78m in July to take fifth spot with 2.24m in August.

Interestingly, the new Australian online edition of British newspaper The Guardian had 1.306m Australian visitors to its news sites in August.

The result is the largest Australian audience for The Guardian since its local launch in May, and well up on the 1.02m recorded in the Nielsen Online Ratings in July.

Despite these sites rallying in August, the top ten news rankings were mostly unchanged with news.com.au continuing to maintain the number one spot, with a huge audience of 3.05m. In August, Ninemsn’s news websites overtook the Sydney Morning Herald’s website, with 2.85m visitors versus 2.64m.

LOCAL MEDIA NEWS & RATINGS 

# Program Channel Audience

1 THE X FACTOR LIVE PERFORMANCE PRIME7 47,727

2 NATIONAL NEWS SUNDAY WIN9 43,619

3 AUSTRALIA’S GOT TALENT WIN9 37,304

4 BIG BROTHER -THU WIN9 35,534

5 SUNDAY NIGHT PRIME7 35,200

6 60 MINUTES WIN9 35,063

7 THE X FACTOR LIVE RESULTS PRIME7 34,596

8 RUGBY LEAGUE FINAL SERIES SF1 WIN9 34,460

9 BIG BROTHER -WED WIN9 33,630

10 BIG BROTHER -TUE WIN9 33,550

11 RUGBY LEAGUE FINAL SERIES SF2 WIN9 32,778

12 BONES PRIME7 32,728

13 WIN NEWS WIN9 32,264

14 BIG BROTHER CONFIDENTIAL WIN9 31,885

15 NATIONAL NEWS WIN9 31,404

16 CASTLE PRIME7 30,296

17 WINNERS & LOSERS PRIME7 30,084

18 ARROW -EP1 WIN9 26,002

19 MR SELFRIDGE PRIME7 26,077

20 ARROW -EP2 WIN9 24,694