Ireland’s two leading national newspapers are almost neck-on-neck in terms of daily web traffic, if statistics yielded by new search site Wolfram Alpha are accurate.
According to Wolfram Alpha, the Irish Times www.irishtimes.com, which was the first online newspaper in Ireland and the UK, and one of the first 30 newspapers to go online in 1994, has 160,000 daily visitors and 480,000 daily page views.
The Irish Independent website www.independent.ie, which rolled out a new flagship website in May 2007 and revamped its web growth strategy in December 2008 to include search engine optimisation and RSS feeds has 150,000 daily visitors and 450,000 daily page views, according to Wolfram Alpha.
Wolfram Alpha is the creation of Dr Stephen Wolfram, the man behind computational software Mathematica. The search engine’s strength lies in numbers, stats, graphs and solving mathematical equations, and it aims to become the homepage for many a student, researcher, marketer and stats geek.
This week, Independent.ie reported audited ABCe figures that indicate in March of this year it had achieved 2.2 million page impressions due to a busy news month that included Grand Slam victories and the death of Natasha Richardson.
It is now closely ranked second highest to RTÉ in terms of unique users/browsers, with over 2.2 million users visiting the sites. Boards.ie ranked third with 1.7 million unique users/browsers and is followed by the Irish Times, Daft.ie and Eircom.net.
“This was a great audit result for us, with a 23pc uplift in unique users/browsers, pushing us closer to our nearest rival RTÉ.ie,” said Ian Byrne, managing director, Independent Digital.
“This remarkable growth reflects the innovation and investment made by Independent Digital over the past 18 months, and in particular, the focusing on our core Independent.ie site, and tightly aligning technical innovation with our business goals,” Byrne added.
By John Kennedy
