New figures show that BBC.com, the BBC’s international website, has started 2015 on an all-time high. More than 101 million unique browsers used the website and news app globally during the month of January, generating a record 1.35 billion page views.
In Australia, January saw a year-on-year increase of 32% to 4.7 million unique browsers with growth driven across all of the sites including significant growth via news, autos, culture, capital and travel.
The figures come after a year which saw BBC.com achieve sustained growth, with more unique browsers every quarter. Mobile and tablet usage of BBC.com has increased, with year-on-year unique browsers up 67% and 45% respectively, as greater choice and responsive technology encouraged users to turn to BBC.com for news on the go. A fully responsive tablet version of the site launched in late 2014 and a new feature-packed update to the BBC News app is due to launch in the coming months.
The driving factors for January’s figures were coverage of major global news stories, such as the Paris attacks, along with human interest stories including the resurgence of a piece about why Finnish babies sleep in boxes. Features sections such as BBC Capital and BBC Earth achieved new peak figures for page views of 7.1m and 5.1m respectively, with stories on the best places to retire around the world and the Earth’s biggest turning points proving particularly popular. Whilst Culture’s the 10 biggest Oscar snubs ever, became a favourite with audiences across the globe.
Fran Unsworth, director of the World Service Group, said, “These fantastic figures demonstrate the global demand for comprehensive coverage of world events. Our ambition is to ensure audiences are able to access world-class, up-to-the-minute news and in-depth analysis across both text and video, regardless of which platform they’re on – as the stories break and beyond.”
Tim Davie, CEO BBC Worldwide, added, “It is tremendous news that BBC.com has been enjoyed by over 100 million browsers in the past month. The fact that audiences are responding positively to the innovation that we have delivered across the site is particularly encouraging. Specifically, our investments across genres as well as our increasing availability across all devices, is driving strong growth.”
The BBC’s digital success also extends to social media where it was the most-shared news brand on Twitter every single month last year according to NewsWhip, with stories being shared up to 4 million times a month.
