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This is Money reports record visitor numbers

By Andrew Pugh

Daily Mail and General Trust-owned financial website This is Money claims to have hit a record high of 2.07m unique users in May – a 36 per cent year-on-year increase.

The figure beat its previous record of 2.03m unique users in March, when the website traditionally experiences an ‘ISA season’ spike.

Editor Andrew Oxlade, who oversees an eight-strong editorial team, said the success was partly down to renewed interest in debt, tax issues and interest rates.

The current figures are higher than during the credit crunch when the website – part of the Daily Mail General Trust group – saw a major increase in traffic.

‘There’s nothing like people being worried about money to get them paying attention to financial websites,’said Oxlade.

He continued:: ’80 per cent of people aren’t really interested in the economy. People don’t think, ‘I wonder what will happen with the economy?’ – they think, ‘I wonder what will happen with interest rates?’, or ‘what about my job security?’, and we latch on to those themes.”

Following a similar model to that mastered by its sister website Mail Online, Oxlade said This is Money focuses on ‘informing and entertaining’users, and runs ‘quirky’money stories as well as articles on celebrities.

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‘People are always interested in how much money other people have got,’said Oxlade, who is currently looking into how the two websites can work more closely.

‘We want to maintain the This is Money brand but there’s an opportunity working with a website like Mail Online to really drive traffic,’he added.

Last month the website pick up three prizes at the Headline Money Awards 2011, including financial website of the year – for the second year running – and best use of social media.

Oxlade, who joined the website 10 years ago and became editor in 2005, said that getting the editorial tone right can be difficult.

‘You can sound quite insulting to someone who knows the ins and outs about the issues, yet you need to make as understandable for others as you can.

‘We need to be as informative as the Financial Times but as understandable as a tabloid newspaper. That’s quite a hard thing to get right”.

According to This is Money, its website traffice figures are tracked using Omniture.

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