Nielsen recently gave an overview of this fast-growing sector, including the above chart.

Recent news highlights:

• In January, Yahoo!7 Acquired Spreets for $40m. Cudo are backed by Nine Entertainment
• There are over 15 significant group buying sites with an Australia presence
• Stardeals is the new kid on the block and owned by Groupon. They’ve made significant headway in the last two months although are currently ranked #7

The chart above shows the state of play for major group buying sites, based on Nielsen’s measure of unique audience. Cudo has seen the most dramatic growth over the last 5 months. Spreets and Living Social have seen steadier growth over a longer period of time. Interestingly, three sites have declined over the last 2 months at the point when Stardeals and DealMe have entered the rankings

Interestingly, Australian online engagement peaks on Mondays and the peak time (all days) is 5pm. While the trough of engagement on Saturdays reflects my personal Internet habits, I was surprised by the peak on Monday. Perhaps people catching up on email (and gossip from the weekend).

A few other stats:

1. Internet Use: 14.84 million Australians used the Internet in the past month
2. Stickiest Site: Facebook is responsible for 90% of all time spent on social media sites in Australia
3. Social: Over 70% of Australian Internet users visited a social media site in the past month
4. Peak Times: 5PM & Mondays are the heaviest times of the week for Internet use
5. Mobile Web: Mobile Web usage jumped in the past month – more than 250K Australians accessed the Web through a mobile device

Hat tip to Brian Giesen for highlighting the report.

Winetitles is the leading publisher to the wine industry and is seeking an experienced and dedicated journalist for Australian and New Zealand Grapegrower and Winemaker, the biggest-selling industry publication to the grape and wine industry in Australasia.

(Ad via Tony Paul, from Seek)

Of those 51% login in daily, spending an average of 22 minutes per user per day on the site.

The average number of visits in Australia is 2.2 visits per person per day.

Some catching ideas:

Australia, the movie
One of my favorite moments was when a member of the audience asked Nick whether Tourism Australia was concerned about spending so much money on teaming up with the film when they did not know if it would be a critical success. (It was not a critical success). Baker said they didn’t mind because they knew the landscapes and panoramas would look spectacular, no matter what (they did).

Social Media Strategy
In terms of Social Media, various levels of Australian government have been on the bleeding edge of Social Media promotion. Queensland ran a competition for the “The Best Job in the World” to find a blogger and Tourism Australia has one of the highest profile blogger outreach campaigns.

Unlikely choice of blogger
In the below video Nick describes their overview of social media and why they decided to make the unlikely choice of sponsoring a visit by the blogger “The Sartorialist” out to Australia rather than a journalist or travel-related blogger.

The podcast is currently featured on the front page of Australia’s Marketing Magazine.

Great to meet David, who is the managing and creative director of FNUKY. (Aged 25, his bio says he is Australia’s youngest advertising agency head. Well done!)

UPDATE: By request here is a more direct link to the podcast. Apologies to those who could not find it easily enough!

Send David a Tweet: twitter.com/davidjcampbell.