The public’s thirst for EU referendum news smashed web records for publishers including the BBC, Telegraph and Guardian, while Facebook proved crucial in driving the leave campaign’s impact online.
News publishers saw huge double-digit surges in web traffic on Thursday, the day of the referendum, as the public sought news, views and information before casting their vote.
The Telegraph saw the biggest proportionate surge among news publishers analysed by SimilarWeb on Thursday, up 135% over Wednesday.
Traffic rocketed again on Friday, as leave triumphed with just under 52% of the UK vote, with sites including the Guardian recording the biggest traffic day in its history. The Guardian’s website recorded over 17m unique browsers – almost 3m unique browsers higher than its second largest day – and 77m page views, as the fallout of this historic event was felt around the world
The spike was such that the Guardian on Friday overtook the Mail Online, the largest English-language newspaper site in the world, albeit for one day only.
The Mail Online’s traffic stayed almost flat between Wednesday and Friday, according to SimilarWeb.
The biggest winners included the BBC, which saw its visits hit 31.5m on Friday, up from 22m on Tuesday; Telegraph.co.uk, which rose from 6m on Wednesday to 14.7m; and the Independent.co.uk, up from 3.6m to 8.6m.
The Times, which has a paywall, also saw major surges in traffic.
SimilarWeb also conducted research which it says showed the importance of traffic from Facebook in helping the leave campaign win the Brexit vote.
Its study showed that the two main EU referendum campaign websites – VoteLeaveTakeControl.org and StrongerIn.co.uk – reflected the closeness of the vote with a difference of just 100,000 visitors over three months.
Social media made up almost 37% of the Vote Leave campaign site’s traffic, compared to just 18% for Stronger In, which the study interprets as the deciding metric that made the pro-Brexit site more popular.
