Vanguard Beats Nairaland To Become Most Visited Nigerian Site

Nairaland, the largest online forum in Nigeria has lost its position as the most visited Nigerian site as Vanguard, a leading newspaper site becomes the number one Nigerian site.

According to the latest Alexa Rankings, Vanguard displaced Nairaland to become the 8th most visited site in Nigeria just after Twitter. Nairaland, which has occupied the number one position for years now, is now ranked 9th in Nigeria. Interestingly, Vanguard’s audience from Nigeria shows an 83.7% of site traffic compared to Nairaland’s 73.1% audience from Nigeria, although Nairaland ranks better on a global scale (1, 633) compared to Vanguard (2, 257), as at time of writing this post.

No doubt, Vanguard’s website has been experiencing traffic surges for the past 6 months since it became mobile-friendly. The site moved into the top 10 most visited sites in Nigeria barely two months ago, and was trailing Nairaland at number 9 just a few weeks ago.

However, traffic surges don’t really tell how popular sites are since it’s unique visitors that matter most, especially to advertisers. That said, Nairaland is still the most popular site in terms of unique visitors. According to data from Compete.com, Nairaland had over 260,000 unique visitors, while Vanguard had about 60,000 unique visitors as at June 2011.

This is not the first time Vanguard is disrupting web rankings. In February 2011, Vanguard broke into the top 10 most visited sites on the Opera Mini browser and remains the 2nd most visited news site after the BBC (and Nigeria’s most visited site) on Opera Mini beating other content news sites such as Wikipedia, Goal.com and CNN Mobile.

Over the last few months, Vanguard has improved on their content production and distribution and seems to have re-evaluated their content strategy. Also noteworthy is how they’ve embraced and engaged with their audience via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, paying keen and close attention to the conversations on the social web.

Will Vanguard move up in the Alexa rankings? Will Nairaland reclaim the number one position?