ABCe April 2009: Guardian crawls back to top spot

After two months away from the top spot Guardian.co.uk is once again the most popular website of the audited national newspapers.

According to data released by ABCe, the Guardian site crawled its way back in April gaining 2 million unique users to reclaim its number one position. The rankings have been fairly uncharacteristic of late, with the Guardian losing 4.5 million users in February. During this time Sun Online and Telegraph.co.uk swelled in numbers and claimed the most popular spot in February and March respectively.

March saw the Telegraph come out on top for only the second time, with an impressive 27.7 million users. Over the month of April it slipped back down to second while losing nearly 4 million people. While 23.8 million users might seem like a dramatic drop after Telegraph.co.uk’s recent rise in popularity, it’s still a YOY increase of 21%.

Although Mail Online actually lost some of its audience in April, it actually moved up a place to become the third most viewed national newspaper website. Despite the drop of 600 thousand online readers the Associated Newspapers site has been steadily swelling in activity in the last year. March’s figure was the highest it has ever reported.

Times Online is also another site that dropped in numbers but actually rose in the rankings over April. Despite a drop of 20 thousand people, the site was the fourth most popular of the group. Although Times Online peaked in January ,with 22 million users, there hasn’t been a huge drop since. Combined with the fact that this is also a YOY increase of 29% and the News International site seems to be in good health.

The most dramatic fall during April has been Sun Online – which was the most popular site in February – slipping to the lower end of the list. Over the month of April Sun Online only actually had a drop of 680 thousand users, but this was enough to send it back to its more familiar position of fifth place. Again, Sun Online had absolutely no competition in terms of the amount of page impressions it produced, with 322 million recorded over the month, nearly 90 million ahead of Guardian Online.

Independent.co.uk and Mirror Group continue to see small increases, but have been unable so far to lift them up the rankings. Coming in with an extra 300 thousand users the Independent was once again in sixth place. The Mirror Group showed an increase of 1.5 million people. These sites will have to do something quite dramatic to build enough momentum to make any difference. It says a lot that despite the upheaval in the rankings recently the bottom two haven’t changed rank at all.

In a month which saw the majority of the sites lose quite a number of unique users (and a tiny rise in two) the rankings are looking more familiar than they have in recent months. After the red tops’ dramatic online rise, caused in part by the death of Jade Goody, will it be business as usual from here on in?

*ABCe defines Unique User Browser 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.