Credit: By Luke Legay on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
New figures released by the National Readership Survey (NRS) show Guardian.com to be the most read newspaper website in the UK among web-only readers, with 8.69 million visitors in March, just over a million more than the Daily Mail.
The Mail's 7.61 million monthly web-only visitors keeps it just ahead of the Telegraph, with 7.57 million, in terms of readers who only read the website and not the print edition, but combined print and digital figures put the Mail well ahead of the pack.
In terms of annual growth, the web-only traffic for tabloid the Daily Star has increased by nearly 200 per cent over the 2013/14 financial year. The year has also proved positive for Metro's web-only UK traffic, increasing by 88 percent, as well as for the Mirror, with 65 per cent growth, and the Express, with 42 per cent.
Although UK traffic to the Sun's website increased in the first quarter of the financial year, to 2.85 million, it has been falling steadily since the introduction of a paywall in August, to the point where web-only traffic is less than half what it was in March 2013.
Combined with print, however, the Sun's readership is second only to the Mail, and the 'bundle' of apps and content that comes with the subscription is largely based on print and mobile.
The Times, the only other national newspaper with a paywall in the report, saw a 28 per cent increase in web-only UK traffic to the site over the period. Speaking at an event in March, Alan Hunter, head of digital at The Times and The Sunday Times, said the outlet is starting to move towards a profit.
"Our [traffic] numbers look like rounding errors compared with BuzzFeed's numbers, but what we rely on is the fact that the people who come to us are engaged," he said at the time, adding that the outlet has around 375,000 monthly subscribers and users of The Times's iPad app spend an average of 40 minutes a day browsing content. The NRS PADD report does not include traffic figures from mobile devices.
The NRS PADD report combines monthly figures from comScore with a monthly average of the annual data recorded by NRS itself. More information around the figures and their collection is available from the newly redesigned NRS website.
According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation, which measures global unique monthly browsers, March was a record month for the Guardian as it received more than 102 million uniques to its website.
Correction: The first graph has been corrected to show monthly average print figures are from April 2013 to March 2014, not from March 2013 to March 2014.
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