News24's Achilles heal

www.news24.com is the most successful South African website by some margin. Yet, their domination may not necessarily last that much longer. Some weaknesses in their offering and some more astute competition could swing things.

The good

To start with, it should be recognized that News24 is doing a number of things very well. Possibly the most important of these, is the way in which they have managed to build the News24 brand. There is quite simply no other brand that gets close to what they have achieved.

In terms of their offering, their biggest asset is the speed at which they publish news. Crucially, this makes it a site you can visit a few times a day and see very different content each time. It also means that they are usually first with breaking news.

In addition, some of the content that flows in from Fin24, Health24, and there other partner sites also adds value. This is a good example of how sites can feed off each other to their mutual benefit.

The threat

One of the major potential problems with News24, is their relative lack of exclusive content. Most of what they run comes straight off the wires – i.e. nothing prevents other sites from running exactly the same content. And, indeed, you often find the same stories on News24 than what you do on the other news sites.

The ideal model seems to be wire material combined with exclusives. The problem with News24, is that their exclusives are generally not of a very high standard.

Some good stories do make it onto the site from Fin24 and so on, but on the whole there is really very little to complement the wire material. And in particular, some of their columnists are embarrassingly poor.

Better leveraging of their partnerships within the media24 group and the 24 sites more generally seems to be the obvious solution. And in addition, simply buying more good writing could also help.

Keeping up

Whereas the MyNews24 section seems to be doing reasonably well, News24 hasn't really managed to make things like videos and blogging work for them.

There is for example nothing that compares to something like mg.co.za's "Thought Leader" section, or the Guardian's "comment is free."

Whereas some of this may be due to the way in which the 24 sites are structured, it certainly limits the offering and compares badly to mg.co.za and thetimes.co.za.

Turning into a tabloid?

Another point maybe worth noting, is that News24 seems to have shifted their focus to more of a tabloid style of news coverage.

Things like celebrity news and trashy sex columns are getting a lot of exposure. These are of course easy ways of driving your traffic up and may indeed suggest that the focus is shifting to more of a mass market rather as opposed to the more serious readership of thetimes.co.za and mg.co.za and even something like Business Day.

As a result, something of a disconnect is developing between Fin24 and News24. And this disconnect may well be exploited by sites who can offer both solid financial and general news coverage.

The verdict

The strong brand and the momentum of the whole media24 online offering should keep News24 ahead of the competition in terms of traffic for the foreseeable future.

Yet, the fact that 80% plus of their offering can be reproduced with a wire subscription and a few people to code and load must be of concern.

And with sites like mg.co.za and thetimes.co.za managing to combine wire material with superior exclusives, the threat is very real. While mg.co.za's focus will remain a bit of a niche, the wider appeal of TheTimes could make it a real competitor.