THE NUMBER of individual users browsing The Irish Times website increased by 82 per cent in the 12 months to November 2010, new figures show.
Official audited ABCe figures show that the number of unique browsers accessing irishtimes.com rose to just under 3.9 million last November – 1.7 million more than the 2.1 million browsers recorded in the same month in 2009.
The number of page impressions also rose sharply, increasing by 40 per cent from 26.1 million in November 2009 to 36.2 million in November 2010.
The most recent audited figures for the Irish Independent's website, independent.ie, show the site with 1.9 million unique browsers and 26.6 million page impressions.
The most recent figures for RTÉ showed that its website attracted just over four million unique users and 75.6 million impressions.
The audited ABCe figures for The Irish Timesrefer only to irishtimes.com, and do not include other Irish Times Group digital properties such as myhome.ie and ireland.com.
Managing director of The Irish TimesLiam Kavanagh welcomed the publication of the latest audited figures.
“Since we launched irishtimes.com as a free service in 2008, traffic to the site has almost tripled, reflecting the strength of demand among online consumers for quality Irish journalism,” he said.
"In the last 12 months, it's been particularly gratifying to see very strong growth in mobile traffic, driven by our apps for iPhone and Android, and in the number of paying subscribers to The Irish Times e-paper, which is now also available for iPad and iPhone.
“These multiple platforms – web, mobile, tablet and e-paper – complement the print newspaper, which remains our core business,” Mr Kavanagh said.
“2011 will see us continuing to innovate and grow our online audience in new and exciting ways.”
In addition to irishtimes.com, the Irish Times Group owns or has an interest in a number of other successful websites, including myhome.ie, ireland.com, irishracing.com and entertainment.ie. While these sites were not externally audited during the period in question, internal analytics show that, including irishtimes.com, the group’s sites overall had 5.9 million unique browsers and 87.6 million page impressions in November 2010.
