Royal baby coverage: Facts and figures from digital news outlets

As we come to the end of royal baby week, Journalism.co.uk takes a look at some of the web traffic and social media statistics reported to us by news outlets.

We asked a number of major news outlets for stats. Here are some facts and figures provided by them that show how it was a highly mobile and social story. Note that not all of the outlets we asked had responded to our request by the time of publication.

Before reading this you might like to test your news analytics nerdery by taking our royal baby coverage quiz.

Here are the facts in no particular order:

The stats

Analysis of analytics from 100,000 news sites found that 5 per cent of news consumption globally was related to coverage of the royal birth on Monday 22 July, the day Prince George was born.

The research found that 9 per cent of news consumed in the UK was of content relating to the new prince. The figure was 6 per cent in the US, 5 per cent in Australia, 5 per cent in France, 2 per cent in Germany, and 1 per cent in Spain.

The analysis was carried out by Outbrain, which acquired analytics platform Visual Revenue earlier this year. The team there pulled data from its network of 100,000 sites worldwide.

During the hour the birth was announced (8pm-9pm on Monday), 12 per cent of all the content read or watched around the world related to the new arrival.

At 9pm London time, consumption of royal baby content in the US overtook that of the UK. Out of total news consumed, 13 per cent was about the royal baby in the US and 12.6 per cent in the UK.

Mobile phones accounted for 21 per cent of total 'baby watching' globally. Figures for the previous Monday recorded 13 per cent of people accessing content from news sites via mobile.

• BBC

As we reported yesterday, BBC News received record global traffic on the day of the royal birth, with 19.4 million unique browsers globally. It was the second biggest day in its history for UK traffic, just behind the response to its coverage of the 2011 riots.

Monday was also a record day for mobile and tablet traffic, with the site being accessed from 9.2 million devices globally.

The commercial site BBC.com had the highest web traffic day of 2013 on the day Prince George was born.

This post on the BBC World News Facebook page reached well over 1 million subscribers in a 24 hour period – a milestone for the page. The post has clocked up 18,000 likes.

The first picture of the royal baby posted by @BBCBreaking has notched up more than 10,000 retweets.

• The Guardian

The Guardian's royal baby liveblog also saw an historic peak of 18,000 pageviews-a-minute at the point of the announcement, comfortably exceeding the previous high of 12,000 seen on the Grand National liveblog.

The news site's 'Republican' button, which readers can click to hide royal baby coverage, received 700,000 clicks.

Content also performed well across mobile and apps: Monday was the fifth highest day ever on the Guardian's mobile site, just above the day Edward Snowden revealed himself as the source of the NSA leaks.

Monday was the Guardian website's 12th highest traffic day ever, a little below the London riots and just above the day of the pope's resignation.

• The Sun

The Sun website had 2.47 million unique visitors on Monday, with a big spike between 8 and 9pm, as the birth was announced.

On Tuesday the site received 2.55 million uniques, consistently spread throughout the day with spike at 7.30pm when baby came out of hospital.

These are the third and fourth biggest unique visitors in a day The Sun has had, behind the Prince Harry Las Vegas pool party pictures and the story on Frankie Cocozza quitting X Factor.

"Our big success story though was our Baby Monitor, which was a camera fixed on the door of the Lindo Wing over the last week," Derek Brown, The Sun's digital editor told Journalism.co.uk by email.

"It had 767,172 plays in total delivering 363,266 viewing hours. Average dwell time was 28 minutes, peaking at 41 minutes. It was watched in over 100 countries with Germany providing the second biggest audience after the UK followed by the US."

The birth was The Sun's best performing social campaign on Twitter to date, with a click-through rate of 17.76 per cent.

• Metro

Last week delivered Metro's highest weekly pageviews this year, with a recorded 7.28 million views. Out of those pageviews 14 per cent were to stories covering the royal baby.

Out of the top five stories viewed on mobile on Tuesday, three were related to the royal baby.

News of the royal birth has been liked by more than 2,000 on the Metro's Facebook page. Royal baby content was shared on social media around five times more than a typical Metro top story.

• Mail Online

A then and now picture of Diana and Kate holding their firstborns, which the Mail Online posted on its Facebook page on Tuesday, has clocked up more than 16,667 likes. The picture has been shared more than 6,600 times.

• ITV News

In an email to Journalism.co.uk ITV News said "we were the first to break news of Kate going into labour, first to have pictures of the baby on our site, and the first to break the name of the prince."

The itv.com/news site recorded a 50 per cent increase in traffic on Monday and a 400 per cent increase in traffic on Tuesday, driven mainly by the family's departure from hospital.

Between Monday and Wednesday 24 per cent of traffic to itv.com/news came from search, 49 per cent from social and more than half of the traffic came via mobile and tablets. The average time on site was two minutes.

• ITN Productions YouTube channel

ITN Productions livestreamed from outside the Lindo Wing direct onto its YouTube channels. The stream had a total view time of 8,372 hours and an average view duration of six hours – a growth of 1,696 per cent month-on-month. ITN’s stream was also embedded by YouTube onto its own Facebook and YouTubeUK platforms.
 
There was lots of user interaction – with a live comments blog attracting 4,578 comments and a 27 per cent growth in subscribers.

• Associated Press

Over a 40-hour period, the Associated Press estimates that its video was broadcast more than 12,000 times by around 300 broadcast clients using 11 days' worth of footage.

Online publishers streamed AP footage on their sites throughout the day, making it the longest streamed event AP has supplied to online clients.

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