March's readership figures

As there may be a few readers other than the webteam who follow the readership figures always available at the bottom of the Homepage, a word of caution.

If you are wondering why March saw an apparently catastrophic fall in readership, the answer is simple. Statcounter, the organisation that provides the figures, had a glitch which lasted over two weeks at the beginning of March. Indeed, it is playing up again this week.

While the webteam could still see how many readers opened individual news stories, the composite figure used in the statistics we publish hourly and daily broke down. We cannot be exact, but it is likely that between 30,000 and 35,000 readers were unrecorded. The March figure should read around 75,000 rather than the 43,940 shown.

The higher estimated figure would be in line with January's stats (also 31 days) and last year's March figure.

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