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Guardian sets new web record with nearly 37m users

By Oliver Luft

The website of The Guardian newspaper has set a new record for online traffic visiting a UK national newspaper for the second month running as 36.98 million global unique users visited its site in December.

Guardian.co.uk surpassed the 35.8 million global unique users it attracted in November with a total of 36,980,637 last month, according to figures released today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The traffic visiting Guardian.co.uk in December was 61.99 per cent higher than in the same month the previous year.

Emily Bell, director of digital content at Guardian News and Media, said: “December is often a quieter time of year for web usage, but exceptional traffic in the early part of the month ensured guardian.co.uk finished the year strongly.

“Our thorough coverage of the Copenhagen climate change conference resulted in EnvironmentGuardian.co.uk seeing a 15 per cent month on month increase in visits, and a 10 per cent increase in average daily uniques.

“This also resulted in a large influx of traffic from the US – up 18 per cent since November.”

Mail Online remained in second place in December attracting 32,843,958 unique users – a year-on-year increase of 67.03 per cent.

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Despite a slight month-on-month fall in its traffic, Telegraph.co.uk remained in third spot with 30,711,261 unique visitors in December. This represented a 45.88 per cent increase in traffic year-on-year.

Sun Online leaped ahead of stablemate Times Online as it jumped by 3.5 per cent month-on-month to 20,907,012 unique users in December – this constituted a year-on-year growth in traffic to Sun Online of 10.26 per cent.

Times Online had web traffic of 19,854,510 unique users visiting its site last month. This was a 3.86 per cent climb year-on-year but a 5.14 per cent dip month-on-month.

Mirror Group Digital remained in sixth place with total web traffic of 9,702,760 in December an increase of 82.23 per cent on the same month the previous year.

The Independent had total web traffic of 9,347,658 last month up 6.81 per cent year-on-year as it remained seventh out of the few national newspapers which opt to have their website figures audited on a monthly basis by ABC.

Guardian.co.uk was also the national newspaper website to draw the larges domestic audience as 12,559,419 million of its users were from the UK last month.

Mail Online had 11,423,381 UK unique users visiting its websites in December while Telegraph.co.uk had 10,150,039.

Sun Online had 8,090,634 UK unique users in December while Times Online had 6,882,004.

Mirror Group Digital recorded 5,123,378 UK unique users last month as Independent.co.uk recorded a domestic traffic figure of 3,806,862.

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