As reported by the Newspaper Society: The figures show that the average number of unique users per month for the first six months of 2012 increased by 15.8 per cent on the same period the previous year.
Trinity Mirror and Johnston Press reported the largest monthly audiences, with Trinity Mirror's average monthly audience now at more than 10 million unique users a month (+ 11.4 per cent) and Johnston Press' network recording 9.8m (+28.4 per cent). Newsquest Media Group’s network stands at 8.7m monthly unique users and Northcliffe Digital Network has monthly traffic of 6.3m users.
Iliffe News and Media was one of the largest climbers, recording a rise of 34.3 per cent in monthly unique users. The publisher said in a press release that its flagship website within the Iliffe network, the Cambridge News, showed one of the biggest year-on-year gains with a rise in audience of 37 per cent.
Andy Gough (pictured), managing director of Iliffe Digital, said: “The growth in our online audience supports a wider move to increase the total reach that our combined print and digital publications have in each of our markets.
“The focus of the past year has included a specific drive to bring unique and bespoke content to our websites as part of an improved service we are seeking to bring to both site visitors and advertisers.
“These figures provide welcome evidence that there is a new market out there for us to access.”
Newsquest said in a press release, giving figures for average daily unique users, that more than a quarter of visitors to its local media websites were using smart phone and tablet devices in June 2012 - up from 10.6 per cent at the end of last year’s January to June ABC reporting period.
Looking at daily averages, 499,292 unique visitors accessed its network of 158 local media websites – year-on-year growth of 9.4 on the same period the previous year, the publisher said.
Roger Green, managing director of digital media for Newsquest said: “This is the 13th successive audited growth for Newsquest since we first published an ABC audit in May 2005. It’s been powered in particular by the cutting edge, web-first reporting and interaction tools being embraced by our newsrooms.
“These tools have been used to cover not only murder, mayhem and football transfers, but as the Olympic torch relay passed through Newsquest cities, towns and villages our audiences responded in their thousands as they engaged with our content through comments, tweets and other share tools.”
“Commercially, Newsquest’s digital advertisers are benefiting not just from our numbers but also from innovations in demographic, behavioural and contextual tools that get the right messages to the right people at the right time.”
A number of regional sites recorded increases in monthly traffic of over 30 per cent, including KM Group’s Kent Online (+36.2 per cent) – the fastest growing network. Sunderland Echo saw the strongest growth in monthly users of any individual site (+44.8 per cent), closely followed by Shropshire Star (+41.8 per cent) and Portsmouth News (+40.8 per cent).
