Leading news sites hoover up overseas users in August ABCes

By Daniel Farey-Jones, brandrepublic.com, 25 September 2008, 12:40PM

LONDON - There were double-digit monthly rises in user numbers for the Guardian, Telegraph and Times websites in August, but overseas users accounted for almost all of the growth.

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In a month where coverage of the Olympics would be expected to generate more users than July, Times Online profited most with a 20.1% increase, but the Mail Online surprisingly slipped by 6.6%.

The field was again led by Guardian.co.uk, which added almost 2.5m users from its record figure last month. The 12.1% increase took it to 23.1m.

However, its UK user total showed more anaemic growth, climbing 3.7% to 8.8m. This was characteristic of the whole field of sites, excluding The Sun.

Telegraph.co.uk held on in second place with a 17.7% monthly increase to 22.1m users. However, its UK total actually dropped by 1.4% to 6.3m.

MailOnline, which includes the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday sites, lost its third place in the rankings after suffering a 6.6% drop in users to 17.5m. Its UK total also dropped 3% to 5.3m.

It was overtaken by TimesOnline, which added more than 3m users from July to reach 19.7m. This was an overall increase of 20.1%, while UK users increased 4.4% to 6.16m.

There were different dynamics in effect at The Sun, which includes the daily newspaper site as well as NewsoftheWorld.co.uk and Page3.com.

Overall, The Sun was flat, growing user numbers 0.1% to 16m, but within that total the number of UK-based users rose 15.4% to 5.5m.

Independent.co.uk also stayed more or less flat, rising 0.6% to 6.6m; it does not report to ABCe how many UK users it has.

Mirror Group Digital, spanning Mirror.co.uk, SundayMirror.co.uk and People.co.uk, had a better month with an increase of 7.7% to 5.6m overall users and an increase of 6.8% in UK users to 3.16m.