The Guardian returns to top of ABCEs and reveals first mobile figures
nma.co.uk | 28 May 2009 | By Alex Farber, Suzanne Bearne
The Guardian has revealed the first set of traffic figures for its mobile site after regaining its position as the most visited newspaper site in last week’s ABCE results.
The direct-to-consumer mobile site, which launched in February with platform provider Bluestar Mobile, saw 101,000 unique users generate 2.1m page impressions in April.
Visitors viewed an average of 16 pages each during the month, with around two-thirds of traffic coming via an Apple iPhone or iPod Touch. UK traffic accounted for around 70% of the site’s total number of visitors.
A further 1m page impressions of the paper’s website were served via mobile as visitors either choose to access it or avoid the home page redirector by coming in via articles.
The main drivers of traffic to the service were Google, Twitter and directly from users’ bookmarks, with the most people viewing during the morning and evening commutes.
Steve Wing, business development director for The Guardian, said the early levels of traffic were in line with expectations.
“Mobile is filling the gaps in people’s media diary,” he said. “There’s clearly an appetite for the service and the projections are that it will continue to grow.”
The Guardian has secured a series of ad campaigns for brands including National Rail, Samsung, T-Mobile and Visit London via its mobile sales house 4th Screen Advertising.
The mobile site for The Times generated 1.9m monthly impressions from 900,000 unique users, while its News International sister title The Sun saw 2.2m impressions from around 400,000 unique users.
In April 2008, operator body the GSM Association agreed a deal with independent auditor ABC Electronic to check traffic levels for operator and publisher sites, with data expected to be published this year.
The figures come as The Guardian overtakes The Telegraph to become the most read online newspaper (nma.co.uk 21 May 2009).
The Guardian attracted 27.3m unique users during April 2009, according to the latest ABCE results.
Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News & Media, said, “This was a great month for us: a global uplift of4% pushed us 3.4m users ahead of our nearest rival. Our G20 coverage clearly played a key part in our success.”
The Telegraph dropped to second place with 23.9m, a 14% decline in users compared to March.
Edward Roussel, digital editor at the Telegraph Media Group, said the publisher encountered some growing pains due to the rapid expansion in its traffic over the last six months.
“We’ve taken remedial action to address the underlying problems and the performance of our website has improved during May,” he said.
It’s likely the Telegraph’s traffic will surge in May due to its exclusive coverage of MPs’ expenses.
Elsewhere, Mirror Group Digital attracted the biggest rise in users, almost 21%, to 8.59m. David Black, Trinity Mirror’s group director of digital, said the surge was due to a number of factors including its community and social media tools.
