The Denver Post’s digital properties in August continued their pattern of month-over-month and year-over-year gains, according to digital analytics firm comScore.
The organization attracted 6.739 million unique visitors for the month, up 52.8 percent year-over-year and the third consecutive month of growth. The total was up 5 percent from July. On mobile devices, The Post attracted 5.377 million unique visitors, reflecting an ongoing industry-wide shift as people increasingly consume news on mobile devices instead of desktop computers.
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The Cannabist, The Post’s niche digital product covering the cannabis industry in Colorado and the U.S., attracted 885,000 unique visitors, surpassing High Times — long a media leader in the space — for the first time since the site launched in late 2013. High Times drew 558,000 unique visitors for August, a 38.4 percent year-over-year decrease, comScore reported. The Weedmaps-owned Marijuana.com — in operation since 1995 — drew 915,000 unique visitors in the same period.
The Post remained the dominant online player in the Denver market. KUSA Channel 9’s digital properties drew 2.784 million unique visitors, down 17.3 percent year-over-year, comScore data show. Tribune Media-owned KDVR Channel 31 drew 2.598 million uniques, up 37.4 percent year-over-year; Scripps-owned Denver7 attracted 1.99 million unique visitors, up 2.4 percent year-over-year; CBS Denver Channel 4 pulled in 1.338 million uniques, down 6.9 percent year-over-year. The Gazette in Colorado Springs, owned by billionaire Phil Anschutz, drew 1.132 million unique visitors, up 66.3 percent year-over-year.
The Post continued to reach more people in the Denver market. The three month average of June, July and August showed The Post reached 15.4 percent of people six and older with access to the internet, according to comScore. 9NEWS reached 9.3 percent over the same period. In August alone, The Post reached 14 percent of the Denver market to 9NEWS’ 8.5 percent.
9NEWS logged 31 million page views in August compared with The Post’s 24 million, comScore estimated.
The Post’s video-production initiative video continues to show gains. In August, video views on its owned and operated digital properties showed 82 percent year-over-year growth, drawing 1.26 million views to its own content. When factoring video in from partners and syndication, that number jumped to nearly 1.6 million.
Those figures do not include additional views from video produced for social media platforms, which The Post’s video team has increasingly focused on, driven partly by Facebook’s favorability toward displaying that type of content in users’ newsfeeds.
People ages 18-34 made up 45.8 percent of The Post’s overall audience, while the group was 43.6 percent of 9NEWS’ audience in August, comScore reports show. Those 25-44 years of age — older millennials and younger Generation X users — were 47.5 percent of The Post’s audience, and 48.1 percent of KUSA’s audience.
Unique visitors to The Post’s main digital property — denverpost.com — grew to 5.365 million, up 25.3 percent year-over-year.
ComScore is a third-party analytics platform, similar to the TV ratings from Nielsen that measure audience across media properties, brands and advertisers.
