Rival papers question Telegraph web visits

22 May 2008

Publishers have questioned the standards used to measure visits to online news sites, after The Telegraph's web traffic grew by 6.3 million visitors over a two-month period.

According to figures published today by online auditor ABCe, Telegraph.co.uk was visited by 18,646,112 unique users during April, taking it above Guardian.co.uk to become the most popular UK newspaper website.

Writing in the Guardian, which had 100,095 fewer visitors in the same period, Jemima Kiss said that the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards (Jicwebs) had agreed to review the analytics used to measure national newspapers' traffic.

In a Telegraph blog entry, Shane Richmond conceded that the paper's advantage was small, and predicted that "the lead may well change hands several times in the coming months". He noted that, with 18,039,943 visits in April, the Daily Mail was in a close third place and might also soon challenge for the lead.

In March 2007, the most recent month for which ABCe has published figures, bbc.co.uk had 90,076,709 unique visits.

Category: Online journalism, Online marketing