ABC August 2012: Olympic fever has a positive impact on newspaper sites

The MailOnline continues its digital success with the highest number of daily average unique browsers – up 7% from July to August 2012. Its total is now up to almost 6.6 million.

guardian.co.uk also enjoyed a substantial rise of daily browsers in August – up 10.5% on July’s number. guardian.co.uk is the second most popular newspaper website in our analysis with a total of more than 3.8 million daily average unique browsers.

The latest online ABC results show that the Olympic Games helped boost daily browsers for all newsbrands – with the Telegraph‘s online offering up 5.8% in August to 2.75 million daily average unique browsers, The Sun up 8.9% to 1.7 million, the Mirror Group Digital up 2.5% to 840,000 and The Independent up by a massive 22.5% to 909,000.

The latest ABC results come a week after NRS PADD (Print and Digital Data) was released for the first time.

The figures also follow recent research by Newsworks and comScore, which shows that online national newspaper websites attracted record levels of activity in the opening days of the Olympic Games.

Newsbrand sites saw an increase of over nine million visits over the opening weekend – an increase of 57% on the comparative period from a year ago.

Time spent on newsbrand sites also hit new heights with an increase of 65%. On the Friday of the opening ceremony alone, newsbrand sites delivered over 13 million pages to UK internet users, a 22% increase on the same Friday in 2011.