The Sun’s decision to relax its paywall continued to pay off in August as the Sun.co.uk saw its average daily visitors jump 62% to 1.3 million.
That was up on nearly 800,000 in July, the first month in which the tabloid’s website began offering a large proportion of its online articles for free and the first since 2013 in which it reported numbers to the Audit Bureau of Circulation.
The jump means the Sun website is now attracting more visitors a day than the websites of either the Daily Star or Daily Express.
The Sun’s decision to drop its “hard” paywall approach for the Sun came just two months before Rebekah Brooks took over as the chief executive of parent company News UK from Mike Darcey, who had successfully pioneered the approach at the Times but failed to achieve similar success at its tabloid stablemate.
The Sun has a lot of ground to make up on most of its rivals, which have been focussing on growing their digital audience, however most newspaper websites saw small declines during the month.
The most popular, MailOnline, was down 4% to 13.7 million, while its next closest rival, theguardian.com, was down 6% to 7.5 million.
The only national title other than the Sun to record an increase was the Independent, which recorded a 2.4% increase in visitors to 2.5 million.
The Express.co.uk and dailystar.co.uk websites saw the largest falls, down 8.3% and 14.3% respectively, suggesting the Sun’s new approach may be eating into their audience.
MailOnline 13,702,757 (-4.05)
theguardian.com 7,521,682 (-6.17)
Telegraph 4,414,791(-2.83)
Mirror Group Nationals 4,268,458 (-0.04)
The Independent 2,520,455 (2.44)
Metro 1,400,115 (-13.05)
The Sun 1,289,9226 (2.66)
express.co.uk 1,213,435 (-8.33)
dailystar.co.uk 878,089 (-14.36)
