Where are SA's richest netizens?
Nielsen//NetRatings, a global leader in Internet media and market research, looks at how the South African Internet population is composed in terms of household income and where the wealthiest South Africans are going online. One quarter of this population comes from high-income households, with Moneyweb and Runner's World exhibiting the greatest affinity with this group.
Alex Burmaster, internet analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings says, “Few other domestic online markets exhibit such a correlation between wealth and sport as the SA market does. While financial and business sites are common internationally amongst those attracting the wealthiest households, sport doesn't feature to nearly the degree that it does in SA.
“Take the UK, for example, not one of the twenty most popular sites with highest-income households has anything to do with sport; in contrast South Africa has twelve in the top twenty.”
Four of the 10 brands with the greatest concentration of traffic from R400 000+ income households are sports sites and two are mining sites. Financial information site Moneyweb has the highest concentration of traffic (39%) from R400 000+ income households, followed by Runner's World (35%) and Golf Digest (35%).
How the SA Internet population is composed by household income:
- Almost a quarter (24%) comes from households with an annual income of at least R400 000
- In contrast, almost one in eight (13%) come from households whose annual income is below R50 000
“Although all income groups are well-represented, SA's Internet population is not representative of the country's entire population, overall. High-income households might be the dominant group online but, of course, this is not the case amongst the country as a whole,” adds Burmaster.
Note: this research is based on Online Publishers Association (OPA) member data and is not data for the whole of SA.
