ABC August 2013: Newsbrands see healthy online growth

The latest ABC results for newsbrands’ online platforms paints a healthy picture, with just guardian.co.uk seeing a decline over the month (-5.8%).

The Telegraph online saw the greatest increase in daily average unique browsers overall, up 12.9% and netting an extra 355,000 – a contrast to guardian.co.uk’s loss of 280,000.

Mirror Digital Group followed, up 19.6% and 284,000, taking it to almost 1.5 million unique browsers per day – perhaps benefiting from the Sun’s decision to place a paywall around its online content.

MailOnline, though only up 2.1%, added almost 200,000 extra daily browsers in August, securing its position as the most visited online news site, while the Independent online enjoyed an extra 70,000 (up 5.7%).

News UK titles, including the Times and Sun+ are not reported in the current ABC findings. However, figures from SimilarWeb, a web metrics company, suggest that global visits to the Sun+, which last month placed content behind a paywall, dropped from 37.3 million in July to an 14.4 million in August – a drop of 60%.

Industry experts, including Newsline columnist Raymond Snoddy, have called on News UK to begin supplying readership and online browser figures.

“The official line is that talks are continuing on revealing the online figures which are diligently collected every month by the ABC but which cannot be released without permission,” Snoddy said last month.

“The story goes that talks are continuing and it’s only a matter of process. For the sake of the industry, and above all News UK itself, it really is time to sort out this process. The absence of real numbers could lead to speculation that is more negative than the reality.”