When it involves number of visits the BBC, which dominates in the UK, additionally continues to hold the number one spot globally. Its closest competitors, Microsoft’s well-liked desktop news aggregator MSN and the net site of cable stalwart CNN, had 882.5m and 612.7m visits respectively, leaving the BBC the clear leader by a margin of 30% over second-place MSN. Bucking the development among this list of ten leading sites was the New York Times which had 546.5m visits in March (up 51%) and Mail Online (354.5m visits, up 11%). The New York Times’ acquisition of Wordle in January will doubtless have been among the many factors that have helped enhance its reputation. The fastest growing website overall among the entire top 50 record was once more, Live Universal Awareness Map (liveuamap.com), which presents updates on conflicts in the form of a map (53.2m visits, up 1987%).

For year-on-year growth among the prime 50 global news sites as a complete, a number of English-language news websites from India did properly in November, echoing their October success. It was adopted by another US web site nytimes.com (327 million visits -down 54%). Both websites undoubtedly benefitted from the surge in curiosity last November …