ABC November: Sun+ sees traffic soar as paywall comes down

Online traffic to the Sun+ has soared almost 26% following the decision to remove its paywall. The boost is even more impressive given the paywall was still in place for most of the month, suggesting stronger growth is yet to come.

Publisher News UK took the decision in October to take down the paywall after the two-year experiment was deemed a barrier to driving long-term growth.

According to the latest ABC data, an extra 330,100 unique browsers made it to the site last month, with total traffic reaching 1.6m.

Elsewhere in the market there was good news all-round for online UK newsbrands, with only a handful recording any declines.

Evening Standard, Metro, The Independent and Trinity Mirror Nationals all recorded strong growth – no doubt due to extensive coverage of the Paris attacks.

However, no newsbrands could match the traffic at either Mail Online or theguardian.com. The former leads the market by some margin with a total audience of 14.6m and the latter 9.3m – almost 5m ahead of third-place holder Trinity Mirror.