You filthy, filthy Kiwis: Nielsen survey reveals New Zealanders' favourite porn sites

I’ve been browsing through the September 2014 stats for Nielsen’s MediaView survey.

Measuring online audience is always a little bit of a dark art. With MediaView, Nielsen pulls data from a number of sources including a people panel and tag-based server counts for a hybrid total.

Of course, total traffic isn’t the only measure of success for these sites. For a number, it’s what you buy (yes, including subscriptions) once you arrive.

Here are the 10 sites with the largest unique audience (their 2013 figure is in brackets).

1. Google: 2,999,000 (3,033,000)
2. Microsoft: 2,549,000 (2,573,000)
3. Facebook: 2,371,000 (2,486,000)
4. Trade Me: 2,020,000 (1,858,000)
5. NZ Government: 1,735,000 (1,439,000)
6. Yahoo: 1,722,000 (1,772,000)
7. NZME ( incl NZ Herald, ZB, Grabone): 1,644,000 (1,276,000)
8. Fairfax (incl Stuff.co.nz): 1,581,000 (1,413,000)
9. Wikimedia Foundation: (Wikipedia) 1,364,000
10. InterActiveCorp: 1,260,000

InterActiveCorp is the owner of dozens of online brands, including Vimeo. Ask.fm and Tinder. If you disqualified it for not being what most people would think of as a website, then number 10 would be NZ Post with its unique audience of 946,000.

NBR ONLINE, if you’re wondering, has a unique monthly audience of 122,000 by Nielsen MediaView’s survey. That's a jump from the year-ago 49,000. But, again, there are only two stories in publishing: you’ve either got the biggest audience or the best audience, and no prizes for guessing which metric our paywall-driven site targets.

Here’s how things stack up in a number of other categories.

Social media

1. Facebook: 2,371,000 (2,486,000)
2. LinkedIn: 540,000 (435,000)
3. Twitter: 434,000 (410,000)
4. Pinterest: 450,000 (296,000)

Sharing

1. VEVO: 720,000 (437,000)
2. Dropbox: 585,000 (278,000)
3. Pinterest: 450,000 (296,000)
4. BitTorrent: 333,000 (323,000)
5. imgur: 193,000 (136,000)

(Instagram, now part of Facebook, isn’t surveyed separately. Similarly, YouTube falls under Google.)

Shopping

1. Amazon: 935,000 (830,000)
2. Warehouse: 811,000 (705,000)
3. Woolworths (incl Countdown): 689,000 (631,000)
4. MightyApe: 441,000 (349,000)
5. Torpedo7: 405,000 (387,000)
6. Fishpond: 384,000 (230,000)
7. Alibaba.com: 325,000 (219,000) 
8. Foodstuffs (Pak’n’Save): 241,000 (224,000)

My tender sensibilities were unaware of RedTube until Vodafone NZ told me it was the third most trafficked site through its mobile network after Facebook and TradeMe . 

It's the top-rating adult site by Nielsen's count, though still way down its MediaView list overall at 89 — possibly during the people panel leg there are some folk who are a little shy.

Of course, content may offend on these sites. And don’t come crying to me if you get fired for surfing them during work time.

Porn

1. RedTube: 225,000 (206,000)
2. XVideos 210,000 (207,000)
3. Pornhub: 194,000 (220,000)
4. xHamster: 169,000 (162,000)
5. Xnxx: 155,000 (68,000)   
6. YouPorn: 151,000 (150,000)
7. Tube8: 102,000 (194,000)

(And it goes on and on, but I'll stop this category there.)

Random

TAB: 152,000 (147,000)
Jamie Oliver Enterprises: 115,000 (62,000)
Chelsea Winter: 112,000 (not listed Sept 2013)
Quickflix: 60,000 (65,000)
NZX: 52,000 (34,000)
AirBNB: 46,000 (not listed)
Onion.com: 43,000 (not listed)
Builderscrack.co.nz: 25,000 (14,000)
Netflix: 25,000 (not listed)