Mail Online now claims to have substantially more online readers globally than BBC News.
Last week, ABC released figures stating that Mail Online attracted 93.7m global ‘unique browsers' in June – making it the most popular UK newspaper website by some margin.
Quoting figures from Comscore, which uses a survey-based method in addition to information from publishers' computers, Mail Online claimed it had 44.7m monthly unique visitors in June.
This makes Mail Online the most popular newspaper website in the world according to Comscore, which gave the next-rated New York Times 38.1m unique visitors that month.
According to Mail Online, the Comscore data also gives the title a strong lead on the BBC with 35 per cent more monthly unique visitors globally than BBC News.
The BBC does not release monthly web traffic data. Press Gazette is seeking further verification on these figures from Mail Online.
Mail Online also revealed that 549,243 users accessed the paper's iPhone app in June and that 239,741 did so every day.
It claimed a further 261,476 unique visitors for its Android app in June, some 70,584 of whom accessed it every day.
Citing data from another web metrics company, Hitwise, Mail Online claimed that it attracted 43 per cent of visits to UK national newspaper websites in June versus somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent for Guardian.co.uk, the Telegraph and The Sun.
UPDATE: The BBC has now contacted Press Gazette to say that the figure cited by Mail Online does not include traffic from sport, weather or the World Service. When these are included, the BBC said, it had 54.7m unique visitors globally in June according to Comscore.
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