29th October 2007
Four out of five newspaper websites audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulations electronic (ABCe) benefited from a record number of visitors, says the Guardian.
Guardian Unlimited received over 16 million unique visitors during September, an increase of nearly 29 per cent from the previous year.
Times Online was in second place with 12.5 million visitors.
Quoted in the Times, editor-in-chief of Times Online Anne Spackman said: "The work we've been doing on search engine optimisation for the past few months is starting to bear fruit and allowed us to take advantage of the big news events."
The web industry has an obligation to reliably record internet traffic, especially when making claims to advertisers about audience size, says the Guardian.
The newspaper explains that it is "rather disgraceful" that it took major newspapers 11 years to publish monthly website traffic figures to the ABCe.
As people shift from printed newspapers to online editions, the news industry must increase its online advertising revenues dramatically in order to make up for lost profit, according to a report by the Guardian last year.
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