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. As a follow-up from November 2015, data was gathered from Alexa and SimilarWeb to get a view of the web traffic to these news web sites. Alexa ranked Defimedia.info as 5th top site in Mauritius, Lexpress.mu as the 6th top site, and Lemauricien.com as the 107th top site.
The desktop and mobile traffic for defimedia.info in March was estimated at 920,000 visits monthly. In August, the estimated desktop and mobile monthly visits was 1,150,000. 79.24% of the traffic was from Mauritius.
The desktop and mobile traffic for lexpress.mu in March was estimated at 1,700,000 visits monthly. In August, the estimated desktop and mobile monthly visits was 1,450,000. 71.28% of the traffic was from Mauritius.
The desktop and mobile traffic for lemauricien.com in May was estimated at 510,000 visits monthly. In August, the estimated desktop and mobile monthly visits was 400,000. 42.79% of the traffic was from Mauritius and 19.90% was from France.
Facebook accounted for 29.21% of the traffic source to defimedia.info while search engines accounted for 18.88% of the traffic. 30.31% of the traffic to lexpress.mu was from Facebook while 15.84% of the traffic was from search engines. 5.30% of the traffic to lemauricien.com was from Facebook while 40.64% of the traffic was from search engines.
The conclusion about the 2015 decrease in readership was that visitors were turning to other sources for news. A comparison between the 2015 and 2016 figures shows that there has been an increase in readership.
One of the news sites was slow to display webpages because the web site of the advertiser which it used for ad delivery generated a "connection timeout" error. That does not explain the significant drop in the Alexa ranking of the news site as the technical issue occurred between July and September.
In August, the (desktop) visitor spent 4:02 minutes on defimedia.info. The time spent by a lexpress.mu visitor was 3:21 minutes and the time spent by a lemauricien.com visitor was 1:53 minutes.
1. www.alexa.com, "Alexa", 28 September 2016
2. www.similarweb.com, "SimilarWeb", 28 September 2016