Online Visitors Drawn To The Sun

The Sun, the UK's biggest selling daily newspaper, attracted a record number of visitors last year, with global readership gains equating to nearly as much as the UK population.

by Helen Leggatt

The 2006 figures are impressive. The Sun Online is claiming 56 million new readers to its website, 1.2 billion page impressions and around 160 million individual readers.

According to Sun Online editor Pete Picton, the site's new community feature MySun has been an "instant hit" and readers' contributions have helped to make it Britain's "best-read" website.

Rupert Murdoch, who bought MySpace in 2005, revamped the Sun Online site last year to include more Web 2.0 features including RSS, blogs, video, podcasts and mobile technology.

“We're delighted with the overall growth in user numbers of the site, and it shows that our readers are responding to the new features and content we've added over the past year," said Marc Webber, assistant editor of The Sun online (via NMA).

The site was audited by ABC Electronic in January, April, August, September, October and November 2006. In December, 2006, ABC Electronic announced that its main measure will be changed from page impressions to unique users.