ABC: Metro daily traffic goes up by a quarter in October while other titles stall

The number of people who read commuter title Metro online daily has gone up by a quarter in October, reveal the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulation released today.

Some 1,159,637 daily average unique browsers accessed the Metro website in October, up 25.29 per cent from 925,535 in September.

Metro reported the highest growth in daily average browsers from the outlets included in the Monthly Multi-platform Report, followed by The Sun with a 16.03 per cent growth in daily online readers.

The Sun, who has only been featured in the ABC report since July, has grown its online readership considerably since. After reporting 792,994 daily average browsers in its first month, its website is now read by 1,286,605 people on average every day.

The Sun has been behind a paywall since 2013, but News UK, its publisher, has recently started making more Sun content available for free, and will be scrapping the paywall entirely, as the Guardian reported in October.


The only other title featured in the ABC report to register a daily traffic growth in October was The Daily Star, which has been losing hundreds of thousands of online readers each month since it passed the 1 million mark in July this summer.

The Star reported 623,977 daily average unique browsers in October, up 9.35 per cent from 570,609 in September.

Elsewhere, October was a slow month. Daily traffic to The Express and MailOnline stalled, dropping 0.2 per cent and 0.8 per cent respectively.

Traffic to The Guardian dipped last month as well, and the outlet reported 8.15 million daily readers in October, down 2.59 per cent from 8.37 in September.

The Telegraph registered a traffic drop of 3.03 per cent, while Mirror Group Nationals and The Independent lost 4.93 per cent and 5.25 per cent of their daily average browsers respectively.


But despite the traffic drop in October, The Express reported the highest year-on-year growth, with its number of daily online readers up 53.35 per cent from 2014 – followed by the Guardian at 30.77 per cent.

MailOnline remains the most read title, with 13.24 million daily browsers accessing the site in October, up 9.73 per cent year-on-year.

Metro is the only news outlet in the report where daily traffic dropped year-on-year, down 6.80 per cent.

Update: This article has been edited to correct the number of daily average unique browsers Metro reported in October.

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