South African business media, measured rather than described.
South African business media, measured.Everything South African business media publishes, tracked and counted. No single publication can see this, because none of them can see across all the others. These are the numbers that come out when you do.
2026-08-26 to 2026-09-25 · updated 2026-09-25
- 4175items publishedover 26 days, 164 on a median day
- 57publishersfiling under 98 separate feeds
- 1.9%was the same story twice30 of 3078 stories ran in more than one publisher
- 28.2%came from five publishersthe rest is spread across everyone else
Almost nothing here is the same story twice
The assumption about a small media market is that everyone covers the same handful of stories. Over this window that is not what the record shows. Of 3078 distinct stories, only 30 appeared in more than one publisher, which is 1.9% of everything published.
The practical consequence is the uncomfortable one. If you follow two or three publications, you are not getting a slightly narrower version of the picture. You are getting a different, mostly non-overlapping slice of it, and the things you never see are not the things somebody else also reported.
The stories that did travel
- 3 outletsAfrihost – South Africa’s best hosting provider and ISP
- 3 outletsElectra Mining Africa: More to see, learn and experience
- 2 outletsNews24 | Sex for cigarettes, sleeping on floors: Ex-inmate describes life in ‘horrible’ Kgosi Mampuru
- 2 outletsOn the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem
- 2 outletsNews24 | Mashatile unseen since July as whispers of serious illness mount, despite assurances
Who publishes the most
- bizcommunity512
- tldr208
- mybroadband156
- itweb153
- businesstech149
- moneyweb148
- news24147
- techcentral145
- daily investor130
- daily maverick130
What kind of events they were
- expansion568
- funding and investment404
- regulatory action247
- deals and disposals190
- leadership changes151
- security incidents134
- compliance notices114
- tenders and contracts78
- results77
- cost pressure50
Method, and what these numbers are not
Every item that arrives is kept and counted once. Two stories are treated as the same story when their four rarest words match, after removing words common across South African headlines. That is deliberately strict: it catches the same story reported twice and will miss two outlets covering one event in very different words, so 1.9% is a floor rather than a ceiling.
Publishers are counted as mastheads, not feeds. One publisher filing the same article under ten section feeds is one publisher, and counting those as ten would have reported syndication that does not exist. 53.6% of items reached us as a headline and a sentence rather than full text, which limits what can be said about content but not about volume or overlap.
Quote any of this, with a link back. If you want the underlying counts for a specific window or sector, ask and we will send them. See also the sector briefings built from the same tracking.
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