GMA takes rivalry with ABS-CBN to the Web

GMA Network reported that, aside from its strength in television viewership, it has also been establishing itself as a dominant player online last year.

Leading local news website GMA News Online (www.gmanetwork.com/ news) breached the one billion pageviews mark in 2015 and continued to expand its readership base in line with the increase in unique browsers, recent data from Effective Measure show.

GMA News Online managed to sustain its lead over ABS- CBNNews. com in terms of pageviews last December with 97.5 million pageviews, ahead of the latter’s 69 million, which drove the portal’s web traffic.

Compared to the previous year, monthly average pageviews of GMA News Online hit 95 million in 2015, a 135 percent increase from the 40.4 million generated a year ago. From 8.4 million in 2014, the website’s average unique browsers also increased to almost 13.3 million.

The official entertainment website of GMA Network (www.gmanetwork. com/ entertainment) also beat longtime rival ABS- CBN.com in terms of total pageviews in 2015, generating a total of 652 million versus ABS- CBN. com’s 606.6 million.

Year- on-year, GMANetwork.com’s pageviews grew 4.5 times in 2015 and increased its monthly average to 54.3 million from 2014’s 9.8 million.

Unique browsers similarly grew 2.5 times to 61 million from 2014’ s 17.5 million.

With the continued success of GMA’s web platforms, GMA New Media (NMI) ended 2015 with a 50 percent growth in its total online advertising sales over 2014.

NMI credits the sustained improvements in both online sales and web metrics to its growth strategies for the year, which include the optimization of the websites to make them more suitable for “programmatic buying.”

It also attributed growth to constant web enhancements paired with the effective use of social media, and efforts from the websites’ respective editorial teams to enhance user experience.

Similarly, NMI more than doubled its revenues from YouTube in 2015 or a 110 percent improvement versus the previous year.

Aside from their skillful implementation of the YouTube Content I. D. initiative, NMI attributes the growth to more eyeballs drawn to the GMA Network YouTube channel, which indicates that GMA content remains preferred, relevant, and engaging.