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August 18, 2016

The Sun triples traffic year-on-year as Local World web figures boost visitors to Trinity Mirror’s digital portfolio

By Freddy Mayhew

The Sun has tripled the number of daily average unique browsers on its website year-on-year since scrapping its paywall in November, the latest ABC website figures show.

The tabloid had 2.584m visitors in July, compared with 792,994 over the same period last year. However, it fell by 5 per cent compared with June when it recorded 2.730m daily visitors on average.

Only the Metro and the Daily Star websites recorded a fall in year-on-year traffic, down 10 per cent and 8.5 per cent respectively, as all other news websites saw a minimum rise of 5.5 per cent.

Trinity Mirror saw bumper growth across its digital portfolio, including national and regional websites, according to the ABC report.

July’s figures are the first to include former Local World website traffic.

Trinity Mirror Group Digital saw a year-on-year rise of 38 per cent and a month-on-month rise of 22 per cent to 8.776m daily average unique browsers.

The group’s national titles saw web traffic rise by 23.5 per cent to 5.274m daily average uniques. Specific data for individual websites such as Mirror Online are not included in the data.

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The biggest rise for the group was Trinity Mirror’s Regional Network which was up 70 per cent year-on-year and 60 per cent month-on-month to 3.941m daily average unique.

That compares with 2.309m during the same period last year and 2.471m last month.

Pete Picton, editorial director for Mirror Online, said: “Back-to-back record months for Mirror Online is a fantastic achievement, testament to the team’s excellent reporting during an extraordinary period of news.

“It’s pleasing that Mirror Online is a source for a variety of news, with no single topic propelling us to the record number in July. Instead, we saw consistent big audiences spread across a number of stories.

“Two of the top three best performing stories were our live blogs of the political coup in Turkey and the Bastille Day attacks in Nice.

“It was a record month for video – one of our key growth areas – with traffic hitting 39.2m and beating the previous record by 38 per cent.”

Wales Online, part of Media Wales, recorded a year-on-year digital growth of 55 per cent, with 381.317m daily average unique browsers.

Traffic to The Guardian website was up by 20 per cent year-on-year but down 7 per cent month-on-month, seeing it dip below 10m to 9.594m

The MailOnline recorded by far the largest number of daily average unique browsers, up 4 per cent year-on-year to 14.878m.

Newspaper website figures for July 2016 (source ABC):

Title daily avg unique browsers % change month on month % change year on year
MailOnline 14,878,000 -1.17 4.18
theguardian.com 9,594,927 -6.88 19.7
Trinity Mirror Group – Digital 8,776,553 22.4 38.18
Mirror Group Nationals 5,274,596 4.8 23.52
Telegraph 5,193,068 -7.65 14.31
The Independent 3,994,038 -8.87 62.34
Trinity Mirror Regional Network 3,941,607 59.5 70.66
The Sun 2,584,213 -5.37 225.88
express.co.uk 1,762,348 -4.81 33.14
Metro 1,450,938 7.75 -9.9
dailystar.co.uk 937,011 14.52 -8.61
Manchester Evening News 822,663 10.02 17.24
Liverpool Echo 652,063 24.31 26.85
Evening Standard 606,826 -16.4 13.54
Wales Online 381,317 -2.78 55.62
Chronicle Live 270,350 14.02 16.11
Birmingham Mail 266,898 11.27 5.32
Teesside Evening Gazette 115,695 9.07 16.54
Daily Post (Wales) 85,173 4.61 10.45
Coventry Telegraph 63,820 1.4 5.5
Huddersfield Daily Examiner 59,436 -10.33 12.19
Get Surrey 53,167 21.62
Get Reading 52,452 12.18
Visiter.co.uk 10,632 -25.98 14.22

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