Uniquely

This blog has been following the rise of Mail Online for sometime, (cf last year's post "Beating the bikinis") and offers this advice to the BBC: don't trade stats with 'em.

This week the Mail claimed 44.7 unique global visitors, quoting Comscore figures, and said that put it 35% ahead of the BBC News website.

A BBC spokesman said that was wrong, telling Press Gazette: "In Q1 of 2012 the BBC News website was visited by an average of 39m unique browsers each week worldwide. In the UK, the BBC uses weekly figures as opposed to monthly because we see them as more accurate. The Comscore figures quoted by the Mail for BBC News do not include content from other parts of BBC Online such as Sport, Weather and the World Service, which also form part of our news and information services to audiences."

 “Taking these into account, Comscore’s overall figure for the BBC website shows that it was visited by 57.4 million unique browsers in June.”

The problem is that the Mail Online has a staff of around 70 on the editorial side, and just over 30 on the commercial side. Even if everyone at Associated Newspapers was working on the website, that would 3,800. BBC News has close to 6,000 staff at its disposal.