The News of the World has tripled its web traffic in the past year, according internal figures released by the paper.
In March, the site recorded 3.67 million unique users, a 201 per cent year-on-year increase, the paper claimed. The figures include traffic for the companion site for the paper’s new magazine supplement Fabulousmag.co.uk.
Traffic figures for Notw.co.uk are in the monthly ABCe audits for The Sun Online, but the new data suggests that the part of News Group’s online offering run by the Sunday accounts for a growing share of the total.
News of the World senior associate editor Gary Thompson said Sunday papers have benefited from increasing domestic broadband penetration, which has increased weekend use of news websites.
The Sunday paper’s focus on breaking exclusive stories allows it to continue generating over the course of a week despite usually publishing new stories online only once on the weekend. Last Sunday’s splash about Formula 1 boss Max Mosley led to 800,000 page views the following Monday, Thompson said.
‘Loads of our content gets ripped off by sites around the world,’he said. ‘But if you read something like our F1 story on an Italian news site, you’ll know that that wasn’t the genesis of the story, and you’ll go looking for the real deal.’
Video is also becoming an important source of traffic.
‘The News of the World has been filming its investigations for evidentiary purposes for a long time, so we have a bit of a jump on some other newspapers,’Thompson said.
Notw.co.uk’s traffic grew faster overseas than in the UK, with the domestic audience growing at 161 per cent year on year to 1.385 million users.
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