It slipped into the ABC email, hoping to remain unnoticed perhaps. But along with the monthly ABC’s was the website audit for independent.ie for August 2013.
Unfortunately this audit is not directly comparable to their previous audit as the sites under scrutiny are different. This audit covers independent.ie only whereas the previous one for March 2012 covers all of it products (grabone.ie, findajob.ie, globrix.ie etc).
The results are below and show that, on average, just short of a quarter of a million people visit the website every day and 4m people visit the site every month. Using the daily average we can say that when someone visits they read roughly six pages per visit.
While data like this is welcome, and given that there was an 18 month gap between audits we could say very welcome, it still falls short of informative. You only have to look across the water to see what information news organisations there provide in their certificates to focus on how drab the information provided by independent.ie actually is.
All the rhetoric emanating from Talbot Street regarding the ‘digital future’ seems to be lost in this certificate. I can look at the Daily Telegraph’s eABC Cert and tell at a glance that 25.5% of their daily uniques are through a mobile device, a figure that’s lacking in the independent.ie numbers. The days of reporting a simple number of visits are long gone.
Again, like the audits for the print product – always the bridesmaid, never the bride.
| Daily Average | Monthly Total | |
| Uniques | 354,140 | 5,921,735 |
| Page impressions | 2,068,350 | 64,118,859 |
| Pages Per Visit | 5.84 | 10.83 |
