ABC: Guardian and Indy daily web traffic grows, other titles struggle in September

More readers accessed the Guardian and the Independent websites daily in September, while other titles struggled to hold on to their August traffic figures, according to the latest figures released by the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC).

The report, published today, also revealed that Metro and The Daily Star lost a third of their daily audience last month.

Some 8.3 million daily unique browsers visited The Guardian's site in September, up 11.28 per cent from August, while at The Independent, the daily average audience grew 10.3 per cent, up from 2.5 million in August to 2.7 last month.

The Guardian also reached a monthly web traffic milestone in September, reporting 140 million monthly browsers for the first time, up from 127 million in August.

Elsewhere, September proved to be a challenging month. The Daily Star, having previously smashed audience records over the summer, lost 35 per cent of its daily online readers, down to 570,609 from 878,089 in August.

Commuter title Metro lost 33.9 per cent of its daily average unique browsers, a drop to 925,535 readers last month from 1.4 million in August.


Trinity Mirror also followed the trend, although not as dramatically, reporting a drop of around 8 per cent.

This was partly caused by the end of a period of extensive sports coverage during the summer, which included popular daily live blogs.

"A month-on-month drop from August to September was expected at end of the football transfer window, which is always one of our busiest times," Pete Picton, editorial director at Mirror Online, explained in a press release.

"We continue to evolve Mirror.co.uk and have been encouraged by the number of readers leaving comments on the site since we opened that capability in August,” he said.

The Sun reported a drop in daily web traffic, after a 62.66 per cent increase in August – the title's online audience is now down 14 per cent to 1.10 million daily average browsers in September from 1.28 million the previous month.

The Express, owned by Daily Star publisher Northern & Shell, avoided a significant drop in its daily online audience numbers, reporting 1,213,037 readers in September, slightly down from 1,213,435 in August.

The Express is also the title with the highest year-on-year growth in daily average browsers – topping the table at 60.73 per cent, followed by the Guardian in second place with 28.78 per cent and the The Independent in third with 16 per cent.

MailOnline remains the most read UK title, with almost 208 million people accessing the site in September, or 13.36 million daily readers.

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