Nine Comes Out Swinging At Yahoo7’s “Deliberately Misleading” And “Incorrect Statements”

Nine Comes Out Swinging At Yahoo7’s “Deliberately Misleading” And “Incorrect Statements”
B&T Magazine
By B&T Magazine



The simmering war between Nine Digital and Yahoo7 over audience numbers has turned into a nasty public spat with the two rival publishers suggesting foul play is at work in the reporting and that each one is ahead of the other.

Yahoo7 have been busy spruiking its tech/data/content credentials and in the process have used stats to show it has more unique users than arch rival Nine Digital. The research was unveiled to journalists at a breakfast in Sydney yesterday, which was attended by and reported on by B&T. Read the article here.

However, Nine Digital was swift to seize on Yahoo7’s statements and quickly fired off some missives of its own.

A statement to media read: “Nine wishes to correct some incorrect statements made in-market in recent days regarding the Nine Digital network.”

Screen Shot 2017-02-28 at 2.56.09 pm

It included comments by Nine’s chief digital and marketing officer, Alex Parsons (pictured above), that said: “The latest January Nielsen numbers show Nine Digital has retained its place as Australia’s number one digital content network with a unique audience of 14.4 million.”

Also included was this chart that appears to confirm Nine is well on top of Yahoo7 when it comes to audience numbers in Australia.Screen Shot 2017-02-28 at 2.53.23 pm

Parsons added: “Those numbers also clearly showed Seven and Yahoo with a unique audience of 10.1 million. Any comparison of the reach of their digital network with ours should include an apples for apples comparison and not seek to deliberately mislead the market by excluding our long standing partner Microsoft.”

Since the publication of Nine’s quotes, Yahoo7 fired back with a statement that read: “We stand by these audience numbers which reflect only owned and operated assets. Yahoo7 does not include audiences from its extensive third party ad network, we have reported the numbers just as they appear in Nielsen under parent entities.

“We believe this to be the most transparent and valuable comparison of audience reach. For clarity, the data under discussion is for Yahoo7 alone and does not include the substantial incremental audience generated by SWM’s other owned assets.”




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