Mail Online remained by far the most popular UK newspaper website in March, with nearly double the daily global traffic of the next most popular site, The Guardian.
The Telegraph saw a rapid increase in growth, which had slowed since the site introduced a metered paywall last April.
Growth for the site had dropped to single figures year on year since its paywall move. But, according to ABC, global daily browsers visiting the Telegraph rose 23.5 per cent to 3.6m in March.
Press Gazette understands that its return to faster growth is not down to any change in the paywall, which still kicks in after 20 articles, but is due to the popularity of live news, video, coverage of the situation in the Ukraine and better use of social media to promote content.
Mail Online attracted some 11.3m daily browsers from across the world in March and had the busiest day for UK-only traffic in its history during the month.
On 13 March, the website said it had received 6.3 million daily unique visitors from the UK alone. This was the first time the site had passed the 6 million mark in the UK, and surpassed its previous best – set in November 2013 – by more than half a million (10.1 per cent).
The fastest growing UK newspaper website audited by ABC was Metro, up 261 per cent to 1.2m daily unique browsers.
The Metro website is set to merge with Mail Online but is still being audited separately by ABC.
The Guardian celebrated breaking through the 100m monthly unique browsers mark for the first time.
ABC counts unique browsers – which are different devices accessing websites, rather than different people.
Full ABC round-up for March 2014:
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