Olympic Fever Sees Online National Newspapers Figures Soar
Three major national newspaper websites saw a huge increase in traffic over the month of August. According to figures released by ABCe, millions of new users were reported to be logging on to the top three sites over this typically quiet period. It seems that Team GB’s efforts in Beijing are responsible for generating this unusually high activity.
Guardian.co.uk saw its users jump by a massive 2.5 million, breaking yet another record for online traffic. This swarm of interest secured the Guardian its spot as the most popular national newspaper website audited by the electronic arm of Audit Bureau of Circulations.
It has been an incredible few months for the website, which has continually seen its traffic increase, resulting in a 46% YOY rise. The site’s page impressions also jumped significantly to 211 million, a rise of 25 million since July.
Also benefiting from Olympic fever was Telegraph.co.uk, which has seen a meteoric rise in popularity over the last year. An extra 3.3 million people logged on over August, bringing its total number of unique users up to 22 million. This is a far cry from August 2007, when it was reporting just fewer than 10 million visitors to the site. The site has experienced an impressive YOY increase of 125%.
More than 3.3 million extra people viewed The Times website over the month, making it the third most popular site, up from fourth place in July. The site’s increase of 9.4 million users over the last year brings its total unique users to nearly 19.7 million. The number of page impressions viewed over the last year has also enjoyed a significant rise of 74%, bringing them up to 134 million in August.
It wasn’t all good news though, as the Mail Online actually decreased in traffic over the month. A drop of 1.2 million people was enough to allow it to slip into fourth place.
The Sun Online’s activity barely moved, with only an extra 13,000 unique users viewing the site in August. As usual though The Sun’s website excelled in retaining its users with a whopping 328 million page impressions. This is 117 million more than Guardian.co.uk, which is the most visited website.
Both Independent.co.uk and Mirror Digital Network saw small increases compared to their more popular rivals with 6.6 and 5.5 million unique users respectively. While the Mirror doesn’t release its page impression figures, The Independent saw an increase of four million. It remains to be seen if Septembers’ audit will see the more popular sites continuing with their exhaustive momentum.
*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