MSN SA tries to regain traction with upgrade as Nielsen restates stats

This Zehmke and his team hopes to change in the year ahead since Kagiso Media took over management of the site last year. A name change, to Howzit.MSN.com, and a redesign have been the first steps in a strategy Zehmke believes will turn default traffic into a real readership. Howzit is a popular greeting in SA.

Localised content

Content is once again being localised and the user experience improved with the integration of Facebook, Twitter and Messenger into the site. So far, page views of the news channel have grown from 250 000 to 3.8 million a month between the time of the Kagiso takeover and January 2011. Page views on the business section have increased from 25 000 to 800 000 and the local celeb channel, ZAlebs, has gone from zero to 300 000 page impressions a month.

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It's a small team of three driving the site, which relies heavily on wire copy, but Zehmke hopes more top-line content by a network of freelancers will lift the quality of the site. He expects to launch a number of new channels in the year ahead, including a dedicated cricket channel plus ones covering travel and motoring, among others.

On the revenue front, ad spend is growing, thanks to the help of Kagiso's sales agency DigitalMark.

Relatively low industry profile

Still, Kagiso and MSN have kept a relatively low profile in the industry as they rebuild the site. "We don't have a completed product yet," says Zehmke.

Nevertheless, earlier this week the portal sent out a media release (published here, here and here) claiming that it was "named SA's biggest homepage by AC Nielsen just days before the relaunch." The claim created some confusion in the marketplace as homepage refers to the landing page of a site, while generally claims on popularity are based on site (and not just landing page) statistics.

Meanwhile, a Business Day article, citing AC Nielsen statistics, reported that MSN had overtaken 24.com during the first seven days of February in terms of unique users on its site. The DMMA has since confirmed that an error had crept into the data when AC Nielsen combined the statistics from the MSN portal and the Hotmail service, when they should in fact be reported separately.

Unsure of implications

DMMA deputy chair Karen Dempers (who is also head of marketing for MSN rival 24.com) confirmed that the figures are in the process of being restated and, while she acknowledged "current inaccuracies" in the figures for the first week of February 2011, she is unsure what implications, if any, a correction will have on the tabulated site rankings.