The BBC News website still remains comfortably ahead of the Mail Online in terms of UK online visitors, according to research compiled for Press Gazette.
The UKOM/Nielsen data is based on a survey of 50,000 people accessing the internet from office and work computers across the UK and tends to deliver lower figures than ABC.
But it provides a much more comprehensive picture than ABC – which only audits a handful of news websites on a monthly basis.
According to Nielsen, the BBC News website attracted just under 10 million UK unique readers/viewers in July – well ahead of Mail Online on 6.645m over the course of the month.
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Web portal Yahoo’s news service was the top-placed web-only player with 4.1m monthly users.
Despite being behind paywalls The Times and Sunday Times attracted some 1.2m readers over the course of the month, according to the Nielsen data.
Huffington Post UK – which only launched at the beginning of July – has yet to figure in the Nielsen data.
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The Audit Bureau of Circulations, which bases its figures on data collected from publishers’ web servers, estimated that Mail Online reached 24.7m UK ‘unique browsers’in July and that Guardian.co.uk reached 18.4m. Each unique browser in ABC terms is a different computer.
Top 40 UK news and information websites (source Nielsen/UKOM)
Name; Unique UK audience (000s) July 2011
1 BBC News 9,992
2 MailOnline 6,645
3 Guardian.co.uk 4,622
4 Telegraph 4,394
5 Yahoo! News Websites 4,097
6 The Sun 2,916
7 Newsquest Media Group 2,877
8 Trinity Mirror Nationals 2,427
9 MSN News & Weather 2,093
10 The Independent 1,693
11 Sky News 1,530
12 METRO.co.uk 1,505
13 AOL News 1,409
14 The Times/The Sunday Times 1,211
15 Google News 1,179
16 CNN Digital Network 1,077
17 Bing News 1,024
18 MSNBC Digital Network 914
19 World News Network 795
20 London Evening Standard 693
21 News of the World 649
22 NYTimes.com 524
23 Trinity Mirror Regionals 505
24 Scotsman.com 501
25 Daily Express 408
26 France 24 403
27 Daily Star 359
28 Orange News 356
29 WalesOnline 332
30 CBS News Network 306
31 Topix 305
32 Tribune Newspapers 282
33 Belfast Telegraph 270
34 TalkTalk News 268
35 ABCNEWS Digital Network 264
36 NewsNow.co.uk 263
37 Fox News Digital Network 241
38 India Times 223
39 Economist.com 189
40 Dennis Current Affairs Network 187
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