A record 102,286,881 monthly unique browsers accessed Guardian and Observer content during March - an increase of 12.27% on February’s traffic, says the Guardian. This made March the third month in a row with record traffic, up 30.65% year on year. Page impressions also rose 17% from February to 648,627,328, up over 40% from March last year.
The exceptional performance has been driven by strong increases in international traffic which saw a rise of 12% month on month to 69 million monthly unique browsers, as well as continued growth in the UK of 14% month on month.
Guardian Australia reported particular success in March, as traffic grew by 26% to reach 5.1m unique monthly browsers, accounting for 5% of all the Guardian’s digital traffic. This follows statistics released earlier this week by Nielsen, which confirm Guardian Australia as the sixth most popular newspaper brand in Australia.
The Pulitzer-winning Guardian US also continued to perform strongly, with readers in the US making up almost a third of the Guardian’s total global audience.
According to the Guardian, March’s record traffic saw large numbers of readers following the Guardian’s global coverage of the missing Malaysia Airways MH370 flight, as the Guardian’s UK, US and Australian newsrooms offered rolling in-depth reporting across all time zones, reaching over 12 million unique browsers. Readers also chose theguardian.com for reportage of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, which drew 4.6 million browsers last month.
David Pemsel, deputy chief executive, Guardian News & Media, said: “It is fantastic to see the Guardian smashing through the 100 million browser barrier. It’s an incredible milestone and testament to the success of our digital first strategy which has allowed us to offer our quality, award-winning journalism to more and more readers across the globe.
“Our strong performance in Australia is especially encouraging less than a year since our launch there, while the announcement this week of Guardian US winning a prestigious Pulitzer prize underlines our influential position in the US media landscape.
“100 million browsers is an historic landmark for everyone at the Guardian - but we won’t rest on our laurels. We’ll continue to innovate editorially, digitally and commercially in order to break new ground and attract still more readers to our world-class, independent, open journalism.”
