There are three well-known daily newspapers in Mauritius, Le Defi Quotidien, L'Express and Le Mauricien. These newspapers also publish news on their web sites. Alexa ranked Lexpress.mu as 7th top site in Mauritius, Defimedia.info as the 8th top site, and Lemauricien.com as the 39th top site. Data was gathered from SimilarWeb to get a view of the web traffic to these news web sites.
The desktop traffic for defimedia.info in May was estimated at 1,050,000 visits monthly. In October, the estimated desktop monthly visits was 540,000. 76.61% of the traffic was from Mauritius.
The desktop traffic for lexpress.mu in May was estimated at 1,550,000 visits monthly. In October, the estimated desktop monthly visits was 1,050,000. 71.80% of the traffic was from Mauritius.
The desktop traffic for lexpress.mu in May was estimated at 400,000 visits monthly. In October, the estimated desktop monthly visits was 230,000. 40.88% of the traffic was from Mauritius and 24.67% was from France.
Over the last three months, Facebook accounted for 28.48% of the traffic source to defimedia.info while search engines accounted for 22.60% of the traffic. 33.48% of the traffic to lexpress.mu was from Facebook while 15.05% of the traffic was from search engines. 5.91% of the traffic to lemauricien.com was from Facebook while 46.06% of the traffic was from search engines.
The decrease in the estimated desktop visits points to either a decrease in desktop usage or a decrease in readership. Given the significant decrease in monthly visits, it is unlikely that the decrease can be attributed to a decrease in desktop usage as it would affect other web sites as well. A possible explanation is that there has been a decrease in readership as visitors turn to other sources for news. According to Facebook statistics from Socialbakers, the number of L'express Maurice local fans increased from 280,000 to 324,152 over the last six months; the number of Defimedia.info local fans increased from 75,000 to 86,782. It is likely that Facebook is being used as one of the sources for news.
In October, the (desktop) visitor spent 4:35 minutes on defimedia.info. The time spent by a lexpress.mu visitor was 4:19 minutes and the time spent by a lemauricien.com visitor was 2:17 minutes.
1. www.alexa.com, "Alexa", 10 November 2015
2. www.similarweb.com, "SimilarWeb", 10 November 2015
3. www.socialbakers.com, "Socialbakers", 10 November 2015