By: Peter Jančič (Spletni časopis)
In February, the state-owned Telekom’s web portal Siol.net is no longer the second-ranked among online portals in the country. This has been the usual situation in recent years. It was surpassed in terms of reach (number of readers) by Zurnal24.si.
This was revealed by the advertising chamber MOSS measurement for February 2024 published yesterday. The last time Siol.net was third in reach was in March 2020. In early April 2020, I took over as the editor-in-chief and since then, it has consistently been in second place behind POP TV’s 24ur.com. The reach of the RTVSLO.si portal is unusually low; it has even been surpassed by N1, led by the former editor-in-chief of Večer, Katja Šeruga. N1 is owned by Telemach, which is part of the United Group owned by Serbian businessman Dragan Šolak, who operates similar portals in several Balkan countries.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE PURGES ARE FEWER READERS
The decline of RTVSLO is evident in the fact that in March 2020, the most read with a reach of 999,115 was the 24ur.com portal of POP TV, followed by RTVSLO.si with 808,833 in second place, and Siol.net with 808,655 in third. In April 2020, when I took over the management of Siol.net, which had been without an editor-in-chief for a long time, it returned to second place in reach and remained unchallenged until this year. Now it has been surpassed by Žurnal24.si, and Metropolitan.si is almost catching up. Despite being state-funded, the RTVSLO.si portal has been steadily declining since 2020 and was in seventh place in February this year.
According to the data for February, the Advertising Chamber, upon announcing the revised rankings of portal reach, warns that the Siol.net website was occasionally inaccessible in February 2024 due to the website’s renovation, resulting in incomplete traffic measurement. The poorly executed renovation may have affected the reduced reach. The warning is published as follows:
The long-term impact of these changes will become apparent in the coming months. The reach display based on the MOSS survey over an extended period, showing the rise of POP TV last year and a significant decline of Siol.net in February this year, is as follows:
On RTVSLO and Siol.net, Robert Golob’s government replaced the business and editorial leadership prematurely. This demonstrated that the authorities disregard the autonomy and independence of the media. They treat them as their transmission, similar to the approach of the rulers in the previous regime, which was a dictatorship. At Telekom, the new CEO, appointed by the ruling party after a change in the leadership of the Slovenian state holding company, Boštjan Košak, appointed Mihael Šuštaršič as the editor-in-chief in October 2022. Šuštaršič, a signatory of a petition by 571 journalistic activists against Janez Janša (SDS), came from the state-owned STA, where he previously politically activistly defended former director Bojan Veselinovič (also a signatory of the petition 571). Veselinovič, after a similar political purge from the left, replaced STA’s editor Borut Meško and later wrongfully dismissed him. Meško could not defend himself against this maltreatment in court, and he soon died of cancer. After arriving at SIOL.net, Šuštaršič made history by censoring my columns from the time when he was not yet the editor and by eliminating the possibility of reader comments. These interventions, to erase critical comments about the government from the previous editor, happened for the first time since we gained independence. The intervention showed that Robert Golob and Vesna Vuković, who led the project of changes on Siol.net, were quite afraid. A word.
Compared to the previous month, the reach of POP TV 24ur.com in February has also significantly decreased. The portal is owned by a Czech company that, due to protests from SDS, has not yet succeeded in entering the sports betting market by acquiring Športna loterija.
A different picture emerges when it comes to POP TV, considering the average time spent on the portal, which is another important metric for a website. According to this criterion, the POPTV portal has significantly improved this time compared to the past few months when it was declining, but it still ranks second behind the RTVSLO portal.
The comparison of the average time spent on the website in February with the same period last year remains quite depressing, with the exception of N1 and Svet24, which are closer to the bottom. For all others, there has been a decrease in the average time spent on the portal in February compared to the previous year.
Svet24 is owned by the Odlazek family, which, through various media outlets it controls, played a significant role in promoting propaganda against the previous government of Janez Janša (SDS), contributing to the rise of Robert Golob. Part of the media conglomerate controlled by Odlazek is also the Necenzurirano portal, which, in the past, was secretly financed by GEN-I, under Robert Golob’s leadership, through a parallel company owned by Vesna Vuković. The Odlazeks drew attention in the past when it was revealed that they had illegally funded Marjan Šarec’s campaign with significant discounts, as discovered by the auditors of the Court of Audit.
To a much lesser extent, the “Odlazek” media also “assisted” Borut Pahor and Romana Tomc.
All the data in the article are based on the measurement of website visits by MOSS, which has been conducted under the auspices of the Slovenian Advertising Chamber (SOZ) since 2006, and the results, including audience reach and average daily time spent per visitor, are publicly available through the advertising chamber. For more detailed results and data for a longer time period, you can visit: https://www.moss-soz.si/rezultati/.
The research includes only media outlets that have chosen to participate and pay for the measurement. These media outlets receive much more detailed daily data on the readership of their portals.
Spletni časopis is not among these media outlets because, as a small player in the market, it cannot afford the additional costs. However, as the editor of several larger media outlets, I had access to more detailed daily data in the past.
The processing of publicly available data and the graphical presentation are the work of Spletni časopis. In the past, the advertising chamber also published data on the sold circulations of daily newspapers, but they discontinued this at the end of 2017 after a significant decline in sold circulations affected most daily newspapers.
The readership data for Spletni časopis based on Google Analytics for the last three months are as follows:
