Russell Brand helps propel New Statesman to 2.5m unique web users in October

The New Statesman has announced record website traffic with more than 2.5 million 'users' visiting the magazine’s website newstatesman.com in October.

This follows an earlier record of 1.84 million unique users in August, the magazine said in a statement (which quoted Google Analytics figures).

Editor Jason Cowley said: “These bumper figures are yet another cause for celebration as we draw near to the end of our centenary year. But these figures are not an outlier: they follow strong growth all year.

“Since the successful redesign of newstatesman.com two years ago, our in-house team – led by our web editor, Caroline Crampton, and George Eaton, editor of our rolling politics blog, The Staggers – have made sure more and more online readers turn to us to find the very best writing about politics, ideas, current affairs, philosophy, religion and culture. I am delighted that the website has developed its own distinctive identity. Its success mirrors that of the print magazine, which has just expanded to 72 pages this week as a result of buoyant advertising revenues and a significant increase in paid-for circulation. Indeed, subscriptions are more than 20 per cent up [on last year] in 2013.”

Helen Lewis, deputy editor of the New Statesman, said: “Russell Brand’s essay was a huge success for us, with more than half a million hits, nearly 90,000 Facebook interactions and 1,000 tweets. But in the same weekend, we had other, more low-key successes: a piece from our new blogger Ian Steadman which made the front page of Reddit, for example, and a great take on Educating Yorkshire which went viral on Facebook. It’s clear that this is no fluke: our traffic has grown by more than 400% since the site was relaunched in April last year.”

The New Statesman, which like Press Gazette is part of the Progressive Media group, currently publishes all its online content free of charge. Print content appears online one week after the magazine goes to press.

The magazine launched its iPad and iPhone app two weeks ago and says these have been downloaded by thousands of users.

Cowley said: “Our digital subscriptions, including those on Kindle, are growing rapidly and we are now being read all over the world by people who are interested in good writing, original thinking and progressive ideas. We are especially committed to the essay and to long-form journalism.

“The New Statesman continues to reduce its losses and, because of the success of our centenary year, will be profitable in 2014. It’s a remarkable transformation in the fortunes of this great magazine.”