ABC: Most titles' daily web traffic drops, The Sun sees digital growth in August

Fewer people visited the websites of UK national titles on a daily basis in the month of August, coming out of summer after a slow start in June and a record-breaking July for some, according to the latest report from the Audit Bureau of Circulation released today.

After The Independent's traffic dropped in July to 2.46 million daily web readers, the outlet saw a growth of 2.44 per cent last month, reaching 2,520,455 visitors.

At The Sun, daily web traffic reached 1,289,222 unique visitors in August, an increase of 62.66 per cent since the previous month.

In July, an average of 792,994 people visited the outlet's website on a daily basis, following a change in its paywall.

The Sun, which has had a paywall since the summer of 2013, announced in June that it was introducing a more 'relaxed' version, making certain types of content available to readers for free.

The smallest decrease in daily web traffic was registered at the MailOnline, The Telegraph and Trinity Mirror national titles.


Hover over graph to see the figures, or get the full data here (Source:ABC)

Some 13,702,757 people visited the MailOnline website in August, 4.05 less than in the previous month, while daily traffic at The Telegraph dropped by 2.83 per cent to 4,414,791 online readers.

Trinity Mirror national titles registered a slow growth of 0.12 per cent in July, but daily traffic dropped by 0.44 per cent in August to 4,268,458 web visitors.

After reaching a record number of daily readers in July, the Daily Star and Metro have seen a rapid decrease in traffic during August, as the month ended with a bank holiday weekend.

The Daily Star's number of daily web visitors dropped by 14.36 per cent to 878,089, while traffic at the Metro reached 1,400,115, a 13.05 per cent decrease since July.

Elsewhere, the Daily Express, which has seen a consistent increase in online readers since the beginning of summer, saw an 8.3 per cent drop in traffic last month. The outlet reached 1,213,435 daily unique visitors, after reporting a favourable 28.7 per cent increase in July.

The Guardian also lost 6.17 per cent of its online readers in August, down to 7,521,682 from 8,016,000 in the previous month. July was a record-breaking month for the outlet in terms of monthly web traffic, as the publisher reached 137 million readers.

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