For immediate release
The Canary sets online record in July to overtake Spectator and Economist
16 August 2016: Left-wing website The Canary has seen massive growth in July to become the UK’s 97th most popular news site, ahead of major political online sites such as The Spectator and The Economist.
The SimilarWeb UK Media Index for July reveals that the Canary News Site rose 113 places among individual news sites to 7.5 million page views. This was slightly ahead of The Spectator (7.47million) in 98th place and The Economist ( 5.8 million page views) in 121st place.
Meanwhile its owners, Canary Media, publisher of the site, which aims to provide a counterpoint to mainstream controlled media, was able to rise 47 spots from 126th in June to 79th in July among the top UK publishers. SimilarWeb can show The Canary’s most popular article in July was an interview with the prankster of Nigel Farage during an on air talk show, which generated around 5.25% of desktop visits to the site in July. The Canary site saw a 6% increase in Facebook traffic comparing its Q2 traffic with Q1, In comparison, The Spectator saw a 22% decrease in Facebook traffic in the same time period.
Overall, idigitaltimes.com was the UK’s biggest winner as the gadget and gaming focused publication rose 137 spots from outside the top 300 in June to 172nd overall in July. iDigitalTimes is a publication owned by IBT media, who on the publishers ranking, ranked 21st overall.
Of the publications that had a down month in July, none fell further down the rankings than theweek.co.uk who fell from 113th in June to 253rd in July.
For the full rankings of UK media see the UK Media Index for July https://www.similarweb.com/blog/uk-media-publishers-july-2016
SimilarWeb is a global cross-device market intelligence company used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, including Google, eBay, and United Airlines, to discover, decide and deploy their digital strategy. SimilarWeb has raised $65 million to date. Our data explained here.
Editor’s note: Watch the full episode of BBC Newsnight to see these results discussed.