In the final days ahead of Australia’s federal election this weekend, Australians are more interested in reading about Tesla and Space X founder Elon Musk than prime minister, Scott Morrison, a report by Taboola finds.
Over the past seven days, Taboola found Musk, and his recent takeover bid to purchase Twitter, is one of the most popular news topics in Australia, alongside the tragic death of cricketer Andrew Symonds, the coronavirus, the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard court case, and the war in Ukraine.
During the past three months, Musk has generated 7 million page views alone in Australia in relation to Twitter, Space X and Russia, according to Taboola. His largest readership spikes came on March 1 (620,000 page views) when Musk announced he would use Space X to save the International Space Station if Russia dropped it from orbit.
Australians’ interest in Twitter and Musk alone generated 3.9 million page views over a three-month period, an increase of 331%.
Over the past seven days in Australia, Morrison attracted nearly 500,000 page views, compared to Musk’s 640,000. Morrison was also usurped in interest by Seven Network show Big Brother (675K), the AFL (502K) and the Queen (519K).
Morrison is ahead in consumer online readership over opposition leader Anthony Albanese at 456,000 page views. The only other politicians in the top 100 for online readership interest were WA premier, Mark McGowan (495K) and minister for defence, Peter Dutton (207K), who was well behind Australia’s three-time Mr Universe, Callum von Moger, at 425,000 page views.
The interest in Musk is mirrored in the US, showing that despite his controversies, the thing Musk continues to show us about leadership is how to build personal brand awareness, especially as he successfully dominates the news cycle.
Taboola’s readership data in the US showed:
• More people have read about Musk than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook combined, over the past 90 days.
• There have been well over 23 million page views for stories about Musk in the past 90 days.
• Musk has received 32% increase in readership over the past 45 days, beating out Britney Spears and Rihanna. Even considering all of the pregnancy buzz for both stars, Spears’ readership has only increased by 29% and Rihanna’s declined by 60%.
The insights report from Taboola Newsroom uses AI and the largest dataset on the open web to provide unique insights into a range of trending topic areas.