Independent publisher Creamer Media boasts three of South Africa's four fastest growing websites for the year to March 2008, online media measurement and analysis company Nielsen Online reports.

Creamer Media's Engineering News Online claimed top spot, with Mining Weekly Online coming in second.

"Sites such as Engineering News and Mining Weekly have grown at around four times the rate of overall market growth," Nielsen Online internet analyst Alex Burmaster said in an emailed statement, released from London.

Polity.org.za, which offers information on policy, law, economics and politics, came in at number four.

Engineering News grew its unique browsers by 190% from 23 455 in March 2007 to 67 924 in March 2008.

Mining Weekly surged by 156% over the same period to record 30 788 unique browsers in March 2008, while Polity climbed 121% to record unique browsers of 27 544.

The overall market, meanwhile, expanded by 44% in the same period, from 3,4-million unique browsers in 2007 to 4,9-million by the end of March.

"With the focus on consumer media and entertainment, it's easy to forget that Internet is also an extremely valuable resource for the industrial and business sector - and this is shown by the strong performance of these sites over the last year," Burmaster added, noting that Creamer Media produced three of the four fastest growing websites.

Creamer Media CEO Kenneth Creamer said the phenomenal growth of its three websites was due to a combination of being able to deliver high quality, real time news and insight into the key industrial and mining sectors, as well as a strong commitment to fully exploiting both the text-based and multimedia opportunities that online publishing was presenting.

Creamer said he was particularly pleased with the performance of Polity given its social dimension underpinned by its mission of "deepening democracy through access to information".

"I must also emphasise that this strong performance has only been made possible through a vital collaboration with Prefix Technologies, our South African technology partner, which has developed the tools and content-management platform through which we are able to deliver our world-class content," Creamer said.

Prefix Technologies chief architect Sam Hutchinson said he was "incredibly proud and excited" by the performance of Creamer Media's online publications and that it had been achieved using its home-grown Preditor software tool.

"We believe Preditor has evolved into a best-in-breed content management platform for new media publishers and are pleased to see that, combined with Creamer Media's strategic vision and strong content, it has been able to deliver such a solid result," Hutchinson said.

The other top ten performers on Nielsen's list of fastest growing South African websites were Carte Blanche, Mineweb, SuperSport, SundayWorld, Sowetan, The Post and SuperSchools, all of which grew their unique browsers by over 82%.

Meanwhile, the most popular websites in South Africa remained News24, with 1,1-million unique browsers, up 44% on the 782 835 achieved in March 2007.

"The leading sites are dominated by news and email services - they remain the pillars of Internet society. All the leading players have experienced growth over the last year but it's interesting to see that only two, SuperSport and Yellow Pages, have a growth rate higher than overall market growth. The market is certainly becoming more competitive, illustrated by the fact that only two publishers, MSN and Media24, have more than one site in the top ten," Burmaster said.