TimesLIVE

What is TimesLIVE?

TimesLIVE is a South African general news site published by Arena Holdings. On its own about page it states that it began operations in September 2009, that it is published by Arena Holdings, that it is the digital home of the Sunday Times, and that daily content from its newsroom also appears under a TimesLIVE Premium banner with sport among the categories included; the same page describes it as “South Africa's second-biggest news website” without attaching a measurement source to that description.^[1] The characterisation is the site's own.

The publisher's portfolio places it alongside a set of related mastheads. Arena Holdings lists print titles including the Sunday Times, Business Day, the Financial Mail, The Herald, Sowetan and the Daily Dispatch, online platforms including TimesLIVE, SowetanLIVE, BusinessLIVE, DispatchLIVE and HeraldLIVE, and broadcast channels including Business Day TV, Ignition and The Home Channel carried on DStv.^[2]

The group took its present form in 2019. Arena Holdings, described by its chairman Tshepo Mahloele as an investment company established to house media assets, acquired the Sunday Times, TimesLIVE, Times Select, Business Day, BusinessLIVE, The Herald, HeraldLIVE, the Daily Dispatch, DispatchLIVE, Sowetan, SowetanLIVE, the Financial Mail and Business Day TV from Tiso Blackstar Group for R1.05-billion; the Competition Tribunal approved the transaction in September 2019 and the completion was announced in November 2019.^[3]

What does TimesLIVE cover?

TimesLIVE is a general news site with sport as one of its standing sections rather than a sports title, and its own description of the Premium tier lists sport among the categories it carries.^[1] Its sports journalism draws on the same newsroom that supplies the Sunday Times, whose weekend sports pages have long been part of the title.^[1]

Because Arena also publishes Sowetan and the regional dailies, its sports reporting reaches across several mastheads and two distinct readerships — the Sunday Times weekend audience and the Sowetan daily audience — with the digital titles run as separate sites.^[2] The group states that it “serves over 10-million readers a month in SA across its websites”; that is a publisher claim covering the whole portfolio, not a figure for TimesLIVE alone or for its sport section.^[2]

How large is TimesLIVE's audience?

The industry currency figure is dated. Narratiive, which the Publisher Research Council describes as the online audience measurement currency contracted to IAB South Africa and reporting monthly across about 200 South African sites, recorded TimesLIVE at 22 162 742 page views and 5 122 393 unique browsers in April 2022, and at 33.4 million page views and 7.0 million unique browsers in May 2021.^[4] April 2022 is the most recent month published on the Council's report page, and no later currency reading for TimesLIVE could be retrieved.

On the print side, the Audit Bureau of Circulations of South Africa certifies circulation for its members.^[6] Its figures for the fourth quarter of 2023, as reported by Daily Investor in February 2024, put the Sunday Times at 62 202 copies, a decline of 43 per cent year on year, within a member-wide circulation decline of 7.4 per cent.^[5] No more recent audited circulation figure for the Sunday Times could be retrieved.

Arena's own claim of more than 10 million monthly readers across its websites is undated and unattributed to a measurement body, and covers the whole portfolio.^[2] No figure isolating the TimesLIVE sport section from the rest of the site could be retrieved.

Since when has TimesLIVE existed?

The site states that it began operations in September 2009.^[1] That is the launch of the digital title and is a different date from the founding of the Sunday Times, whose digital home the site says it is; the newspaper's own founding is not established by any source retrieved for this page and is therefore not stated here.^[1]

Ownership is a third set of dates again. The titles passed to Arena Holdings from Tiso Blackstar Group in a R1.05-billion transaction approved by the Competition Tribunal in September 2019 and announced in November 2019, with Tshepo Mahloele as chairman, Andy Gill as managing director and Moshoeshoe Monare as deputy managing director.^[3] An acquisition is not a founding and not a renaming, and the site kept its name through it.

Why does TimesLIVE matter in South Africa's sport?

Its significance rests on the combination of a daily digital newsroom and a Sunday newspaper, which produces a different rhythm of sports coverage from either a broadcaster or a wire: match reporting and same-day news through the week, and longer weekend pieces carried by the Sunday Times.^[1]

It also matters as one of the few remaining national general-news publishers with its own sports desk in a contracting print market. The ABC's certified figures show member circulation falling 7.4 per cent year on year in the fourth quarter of 2023 and ABC membership dropping from 448 publications in 2022 to 403, with the Sunday Times itself down 43 per cent year on year to 62 202 copies.^[5][6] The scale of that contraction is the context in which the surviving national sports desks operate.

Finally, Arena's portfolio position matters: the same group publishes Sowetan, whose readership and football coverage are distinct from the Sunday Times', so a single publisher carries two national sports desks addressing different audiences.^[2][3]