ABC September 2012: Newspaper sites – Olympic hangover or pausing for breath

The overall growth trend for national newspaper websites continues. Over the last 5 years all of the sites audited by ABC have recorded large increases.

However, September results – the latest audited period – have delivered across the board declines for all national newspaper sites compared to the previous month of August.

With the Olympics, it is not surprising that last month proved a high for average daily unique users and most national newspaper sites. The comparison with September was always expected to be lower unless several major news events would break and dominate the agenda.

One thing is certain…this slight decline month on month is only a pause. Yes, the Olympics generated lots of traffic but the trajectory is only going up for the time being.

The leading national newspaper site continues to be MailOnline with 6.4 million average daily unique users. Although this is down -2.9% on August, the lead on second place guardian.co.uk grows as the GMG site recorded a -4.8% decline to 3.6 million.

The Telegraph was the best performing site for the month – only declining by -2.6% to 2.7 million average daily unique users.

The worst performance was down to The Independent and Mirror Group Digital with declines of -15.9% and -12.1% respectively. Mirror Group has the least number of users of the 6 sites measured at just over 738,000.

The Sun had 1.6 million average daily unique users, down -5.9% on August.