National Newspaper Sites Hit By December Dive

Traffic was down for all of the national newspaper websites in December, according to the latest data from the ABCe.

Guardian Unlimited saw a fall of over 1.5 million unique users*, although with just under 16 million it remains the UK’s busiest national newspaper website. This is the second consecutive month that figures have fallen.

The Daily Mail‘s site, which has seen its traffic increase steadily over the past few months, also suffered in December, traditionally a poor month in terms of online users. The website saw the smallest decline in users compared to its rivals with 13.6 million unique users, keeping it in second place from the previous month.

Times Online was also down, by over a million users, making it the third most popular site in December. The site has been slowly losing users since September.

Biggest hit by the festive slump was Telegraph.co.uk losing over two million users. With over 10.5 million users this leaves the Telegraph‘s online offering the fourth most popular out of those measured. There was also a drop of over 10 million page impressions.

Although the Sun Online was also affected, with a loss of over a million users, its page impressions remained high at 213 million. Compare this to the most popular site, Guardian Unlimited’s 136 million page impressions, and it’s clear that Sun Online is hugely successful as users stay on their site for longer. Once again this wasn’t enough to keep it from the bottom of the list with only 10.5 million unique users.

*ABCe defines Unique User as “The total number of unique combinations of a valid identifier, Sites may use (i)IP+UserAgent, (ii) Cookie and/or (iii) Registration ID.” Note that where USERS are allocated IP addresses dynamically (for example by dial-up Internet Service Providers), this definition may overstate or understate the real number of individual USERS concerned.

ABC Electronic: 01442 870 800 www.abce.org.uk