The internet traffic ranking of Zimbabwe’s news websites (Feb 2012 stats)

L.S.M Kabweza Avatar
Internet news readership

The internet traffic local news websites has never really been measured and talked about in a standard way. The website owners typically just communicate their own traffic stats when they reach a milestone or break a record or just for the sake of selling advertising and these stats are never verified by a third party. There’s also the issue that the tools used to determine traffic statistics vary from publisher to publisher and some tools, the default hosting web server logs for example, are very unreliable. The generally more reliable tools to measure traffic include tools like Google Analytics, but these are only available to the company using them.

In a bid to just shed some light we’ve used a Google application called DoubleClick Ad Planner which provides traffic estimates to advertisers to help them plan their ad campaigns. The data are not 100% accurate of course but there are generally more accurate than other traffic estimation services like Alexa and Quantcast which focus more on the US for example. You can read more here and here to understand more how accurate the stats are.

The stats below are for February 2012 and they show the estimate unique visitors to each site as well as the total page views (actual pages viewed human users as opposed to search bots) the site got in the month. It’s not a complete list of course, we just picked some of the most known newspaper website and threw in a few blogs that we thought might be of interest to you. If there’s a news website you know that you want us to include here, let us know in the comments and we will.

Zimbabwe Internet news site traffic (Feb 2012)

Important to note in interpreting the data:

  • The stats are sorted according to page views. you will notice that if sorted according to unique visitors, the rankings will change a bit.
  • The traffic shown is for all traffic regardless of source country, so the data has little to do with Zimbabwe’s internet population.

You can download the excel sheet we used here

Update: Added swradioafrica.com which had been previously omitted in error.

18 comments

  1. Pridemw

    wow..thot Techzim would be up there.anyway good work but wait H-metro,i last checked they last updated their site years back n m just wonderin how they managed to be up there.

  2. Communication 24/7

    ok…

  3. kthaker

    i have to say, seeing this article and seeing those figures makes me feel proud. most people wouldnt know why 🙂

  4. nard dog

    Are those figures correct, i wrote to zimbojam and asked them about advertising on their website and if i remember correctly they said that they were getting 2 million page views a month (i must look for the email again to confirm this)? how do your google analytics figures mesure up to this report techzim?

    1. L.S.M. Kabweza

      The figures are not 100% accurate at @baf473387de8cc02ecb037aa9245005f:disqus . They are Google estimates. The data above is not as accurate as Google Analytics, but even Analytics itself remember is not accurate as it doesn’t account for say browsers that have their cookies, javascript of images turned off.

      Hows does it compare to our data? it’s not far off. Some metrics higher and some lower. I’d say 30% error.

      Without the publishers providing access to their Analytics data (to ZAMPS maybe) and ZAMPS adjusting figures there’s now way to tell what the true traffic is.

      This is why this is kind of the nearest to the truth estimate I’d use. Obviously can’t speak on data provided by publishers themselves, so really can’t say why the ZimboJam data you varies with this.

      Here’s something a Product Manager for Ad Planner at Google once said about the reliability of the data:

      To estimate website traffic we use a combination of two approaches:
      1.) We extrapolate website traffic from sample data we collect from a variety of sources. For our sample data Google Ad Planner combines information from sources such as aggregated Google search data, opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms; it doesn’t contain personally-identifiable information.
      2.) Individual websites can opt-in their Google Analytics data to improve the accuracy of data displayed about their site in Ad Planner.
      This methodology is similar to that of other 3rd party online measurement tools, which also use hybrid approaches that blend server side measured numbers with sample/panel based estimates.

      http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4047072.htm 

  5. Zorro

    this is very interesting. i have to give it to you Techzim for making
    the effort to come up with such stats and putting these here (FOR FREE, i
    should note). i wonder if you could get someone to really break these
    figures down and tell us what this really means and possibly relating
    this to your previous article on Newspaper readership and the internet
    (link below). I’m sure that would make for an interesting read.

    http://www.techzim.co.zw/2012/03/the-internet-and-the-declining-newspaper-readership-in-zimbabwe/

    Oh, i am also shocked that Techzim is so lowly ranked here, i’ll do my
    part to spread the word on Facebook, Twitter and GooglePlus too (if
    anyone really uses it anymore).
     

    1. L.S.M. Kabweza

      thanks @c75546be7c2f92ab641de5d053dad14f:disqus 
      We’ll make effort to work on a follow-up on what the numbers may be saying…

      On being ranked low, in our minds we’re Number 1!!

  6. buffdaddy

    Techzim is lowly ranked because it doesn’t have mainstream appeal. not a criticism but it’s for us geeks and quasi geeks. 

  7. CodeZer0

    Looking at the figures, Techzim are not doing that bad considering that thier unique visitors numbers are higher than those of kwayedza.co.zw and zbc.co.zw. The two newspapers high page views are a reflection of the number of times these sites pages are looked at
    (visited) by all users and one person can read the same newspaper several times a day checking for current news. A good example is if you visit this website 10 times in one day, it will only show as one unique visitor but it would contribute 10 page views to your reports.

  8. Cosy

    how much website traffic is there in total then? on a monthly basis or even a year. im asking this to know how reliant are we as Zimbabweans on using the internet to get any form of information. this could reflect the acceptability on the internet in Zimbabwe as a cultural change to follow the developed countries’ communication make up.

  9. Nika | SoundCloud Music

    Nice stats! I can see that TechZim is at the 24th spot. Hope to see this site on the top 10 spot by the end of the year! Good Luck!

  10. lawrence dingwa

    I must say hands down to Techzim in providing such information and also be one of the first reliable and efficient content providers on the web. I must say i am disappointed in all of us zimbos, internet business is booming all over and the most shocking thing is the most providers of content on the web from zim are news sites. (proved by this ranking)

  11. lawrence dingwa

    I would like a personal favour from techzim. Please make a short survey to find out the level of literacy of online marketing (google ads etc). Do most professionals knw they can make money online, if the answa is no. techzim teach, inform them

  12. Gugulethu Mabuza

    Nice article and info Techzim

2023 © Techzim All rights reserved. Hosted By Cloud Unboxed