Indy joins monthly ABCe reporting

Posted by Martin Stabe on 6 August 2007 at 12:14
Tags: ABCe, Independent

The Independent’s web site will join its broadsheet rivals in revealing its ABCe web traffic figures each month, Revolution reported this week.

This is very good news — hopefully the other newspapers web sites will take the same approachh. So far only the Guardian, Sun, Times, and Telegraph reveal their ABCe-audited server-centric web site traffic data each month, and the lack of a uniform metric makes it difficult to make comparisons about the sites’ relative growth.

While no audited server log data is available for the Indy, user-centric data like that provided by online market research firm Nielsen/Netratings gives some indication of where the Indy stands in the online news universe.

According to Netratings, Independent.co.uk has a monthly UK audience of 706,000 — still furlongs behind Guardian Unlimited (2.37m), The Sun Online (1.98m), Times Online (1.73m) Telegraph.co.uk (1.59m) and even DailyMail.co.uk (1.1m).

Still, the Indy may have good reason to start revealing its audited web traffic figures. The Netratings data shows that Independent.co.uk could currently be Britain’s fastest-growing newspaper web site. Despite starting from a relatively low base, the Indy was up 54.5 per cent since last October, the first month Netratings figures were available.

Earlier this year, Indy editor-in-chief Simon Kelner told the Guardian that the site was being redesigned with “bells and whistles attached to it”. So watch this space.

Tags: ABCe, Independent