Guardian touts ComScore win over New York Times
12:12 p.m. | Oct. 21, 2014
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The Guardian says it has for the first time surpassed The New York Times on a prominent web-measurement firm's Internet traffic ranking.
For the month of September, roughly 42.6 million people over the age of 15 accessed The Guardian via desktop browsers, versus roughly 41.6 million for the Times, according to comScore's latest list of the top-10 global newspaper brands in terms of total unique monthly desktop visitors.
The ranking does not include people who visited via mobile devices, which account for an increasingly robust readership segment.
A comScore rep did not immediately confirm that this was the first time The Guardian overtook its U.S. counterpart on the ranking. But Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger and U.S. editor Katharine Viner both indicated as much on Twitter.
"Guardian ... now #1 quality English-language digital newspaper in the world," Rusbridger Tweeted. (The Guardian is no. 5 on the comScore list; the Times is no. 6.)
The Guardian and the Times are seen as like-minded, equally prestigious newspapers on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and they have collaborated closely on major stories such as the WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden and U.K. phone-hacking revelations of the past several years.
But the comScore ranking shows the competitiveness that is heating up as newspapers, which have seen sharp declines in print-based revenues since the 2008 economic downturn, vie for online market-share.
Elsewhere on the list, Mail Online, the rapidly proliferating website of the U.K.'s Daily Mail tabloid, bested both the Times and The Guardian, coming in at no. 4 with about 55.8 million unique monthly visitors. The Washington Post, which has been expanding digitally this past year under new owner Jeff Bezos, snuck in at no. 10, with 25.6 million.
China, as usual, claimed the top three spots: China Daily with 56.4 million; People's Daily with 89.1 million; and Xinhua News Agency, the state press service that publishes various Chinese newspapers and provides content to many others, with 90.2 million.
