News International has pulled out of monthly website traffic reporting ahead of its controversial paywall model arriving in June.
Sun Online and Times Online have decided not to make public visitor data for March.
Meanwhile Mail Online remains the most popular national newspaper site, according to data released by ABCe. For the fourth month in a row the Associated Newspapers site has attracted more daily average unique browsers than its competitors.
Although slightly down month on month, March saw Mail Online attract a daily average of 2.24 unique browsers.
Martin Clarke, publisher of Mail Online, told investors last week that “readers will not pay to consume general news online”.
He said that more money could be made from online advertising than from erecting paywalls around the Mail’s content.
The ABCe figures also show that Guardian.co.uk was down 17,000 but it still managed to pull in 1.85 browsers daily, keeping the site in second place.
This is the third month in a row that the Guardian Media site has seen visits drop, although it is reporting a YoY rise of 40%.
Telegraph.co.uk is the only national newspaper site audited by ABC that actually saw a rise in popularity over March. Although its audience only grew by 9,000 there has been a YoY rise of 11%.
Mirror Group and Independent.co.uk continued the March trend of losing visitors, with the Independent site seeing the bigger loss of 20,000 browsers MoM.
ABCe no longer reports Unique Users and has simplified this metric to Unique Browsers, brought on by a call in the industry to focus more on daily figures, rather than monthly and this has been highlighted in the way the figures are formatted in ABCe’s reporting.
