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ComScore: UK News Sites Still Popular Overseas, FT.com Traffic Down

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We’ve known for a couple of years that UK newspapers are getting plenty of welcome traffic from overseas. Whilst that’s mostly thanks to ABCes monthly updates, comScore’s latest stats, too, reinforce just how good international reach could be for what we used to call Fleet Street. The research firm’s survey shows the top 10 British newspapers on average received 59.4 percent of their unique users from abroad in March...

SEE ALSO: Daily Mail Does An About-Turn; Decides To Advertise To Overseas Readers

Overseas traffic: Most UK newspaper traffic still comes from overseas: comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) found the the biggest foreign-to-domestic imbalance during March was at Mail Online, which received 73 percent of its audience from overseas while 67 percent of internationally-minded FT.com’s traffic is from abroad. Alarmingly for a London-centric site, the just re-launched Standard.co.uk received almost half its traffic, 48 percent, from outside the UK in March. Mail Online was the most-read UK newspaper site internationally, according to comScore, with 12.8 million unique users, followed by Sun Online with 11.5 million.

UK traffic ComScore puts Sun Online at the top of the UK traffic table for March with 4.26 million unique users, with Guardian.co.uk in second and Telegraph.co.uk in third. But the most alarming stat is that FT.com—lauded for its pioneering part-paid business modelsaw a year-on-year traffic drop of 15 percent to 691,000 readers in March. The fastest growing site was Metro.co.uk with 852,000, a 75 percent rise year on year.

News site measurement is a minefield, with different agencies reporting conflicting metrics. ComScore monitors web usage of people aged over 15 at work or home only—so unlike ABCe it doesn’t count views sent via shared, public connections. It says 15.9 million people visited a newspaper site in the UK in March, equivalent to 43 per cent of the country’s online population. Release.

Update: It is worth pointing out that most metrics show FT.com’s traffic is growing. According to ABCe the site attracted 11.4 million global unique users in March, a 60 percent rise year on year while the FT tells us that according to its own internal data it averaged 2.06 million unique users in the UK between January and March, a 16 percent rise on the same period last year.

May 13, 2009 5:35 AM ET

Posted In: Media & Publishing, Newspapers, Companies, Guardian Media Group, News Corp., News International, Pearson, Financial Times, Telegraph, Trinity Mirror

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