One in four for 24.com

Commenting on 24.com's success, JP Farinha, Chief Executive Commercial of 24.com, says: “Combined with MWEB, 24.com's published sites account for 38 percent of our time spent online. This is a good yardstick of market share and can be attributed, in part, to our social networking strategy that combines depth of content with relevant services and freely available self-publishing tools.”

The Nielsen/NetRatings survey further revealed that South Africans utilise the Internet as a source of information with almost one in every four minutes online accounted for by news and weather related sites. Our obsession with headlines and cold-fronts aside (23 percent), local netizens spend the remaining 16 percent of their time on Media and Publishing related sites, followed by Entertainment at 12 percent and Travel, E-mail, Messaging and Chat at 11 percent.

Farinha notes that user activity across the 24.com network of sites is inline with these findings. “News24 in particular has grown dramatically and made up 16.6 percent of the total time spent online. It therefore comes as no surprise that the bulk of SA users' time is spent reading content, followed by email usage and then search. Of the 24.com and MWEB sites, News24, Sport and Entertainment are the top content performers followed by Health24, Property24, Finance24, Wheels24, Women24 and Careers24 respectively.”

According to Farinha, South Africans have only recently begun to embrace the global self-publishing and regulation phenomenon and he anticipates a major shift in how we spend our time online in the near future. “It's interesting to note that blogs, albums or citizen journalism haven't made a debut. From a content perspective, I anticipate enormous growth as we embrace the concept of social media more firmly. Community driven content provided by sites catering to specific tastes or fulfilling specific needs will proliferate as will those providing its users the opportunity to interact with likeminded individuals.”