Interactive graphic: How the UK online news market divides up

Using some recent figures provided by Nielsen we’ve come up with this visualisation giving an impression of how the UK online news market divvies up overall.

Normally we only see regular figures from the handful of national newspaper websites audited by ABC – but Nielsen measures everyone.

Nielsen’s figures are a fair bit lower than ABC for a few reasons: Nielsen just measures UK web traffic, and it claims to count visitors – rather than the unique browsers counted by ABC. Thus someone logging on to Mail Online from a work computer and a home computer will be counted once by Nielsen but twice by ABC, and if they clear the cookies from their computer they will be counted again by ABC. Nielsen is based on a survey whereas ABC is based server data.

The actual totals will be imperfect – but the relative picture is probably accurate, and that’s what this visualisation shows.

The figures quoted are for unique monthly audience in January 2011, in thousands.

And here are the figures in old-fashioned list form: