8am BST

95m visitors to national newspaper sites

Mark Sweney
guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 July 2008 07.23 BST

The national newspaper websites of six of the UK's largest newspaper groups attracted close to 95 million visitors in June, according to a new report.

The report, by the Newspaper Marketing Agency, aggregated the web traffic statistics of the 16 national titles owned by its members.

NMA's members are Associated Newspapers, Independent News & Media, Mirror Group Newspapers, News International, Telegraph Media Group and Guardian News & Media.

The Financial Times and Richard Desmond's Express Newspapers are not members.

The report found that the UK online national newspapers attracted 94.8 million unique visitors in June, with 35.5 million of those UK readers.

It also found that online readers spent more than 715m minutes on these newspaper websites in June.

When the data is de-duplicated - only counting a visitor to multiple websites once - there were 66.1 million global unique visitors to NPA member national newspaper websites. Of those, 19.6 million came from the UK.

This means that two-thirds of international online readers visited just one UK newspaper website in June, while around 50% of British readers stuck to a single title.

Google is the top referrer of traffic to UK national newspaper websites, driving almost 33 million unique users, while direct traffic - people inputting a newspaper web address or using a favourites link - is the second biggest, accounting for 22 million visitors.

The new monthly report, called Newspaper Online Analytics, also found that 95 of the top 100 search terms that led to the newspapers are the names of the titles, web address or some feature of the website.

The NMA measured web traffic from the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, Evening Standard, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror, People, Sun, Times, Sunday Times, News of the World, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph.

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