El País boosts online lead in June in Spain

Having already enjoyed a six-month lead among Spanish Internet media, El País continues to increase its lead over other online news sites. ComScore data for June show that the newspaper has almost trebled the lead it had in May over its most immediate competitor. El País reached 7.6 million unique users, against elmundo.es’s 6.4 milion and of 20minutos.es’s 4.1 in the category of news and information. That’s a single-month rise of 452,000 to 1,181,000 users.

June was a particularly active month, with the crisis in Spain and the European Football Championship making front-page news. On Saturday, June 9, the EU’s 100 billion bailout deal for Spanish banks was confirmed, and economic tension has remained unabated since then. This story has dominated the business and finance section of El País throughout June and the first two weeks of July, making it the most visited section of the site. And the month ended with the triumph of the Spanish football team at Euro 2012.

El País’s lead is directly related to changes implemented at the newspaper over the past year, which have seen all journalists now writing for all media outlets, be they print, online or mobile, and a technological transformation. In February, the platform was completely changed and design was revamped, with new sections, blogs and improved architecture that is better suited to the Internet ecosystem.

El País leads comScore’s traffic figures both with and without aggregations from other sites. Currently, the sites ranked (see table) include traffic funneled from any associated site, as is the case of El País, with Meristation, its online video games site, or elmundo.es, which adds users from Dmedicina, Globaliza and El Cultural. If traffic without aggregations is compared, El País, with 6.9 million users, is clearly ahead of elmundo.es, with 6.1 million.

El País readers, in addition to expressing high brand loyalty (more than half of users type directly the domain name to access the content), are also very active in social networks. El Pais is Spain’s most followed paper on Twitter with 1,630,000 followers for its main account and over 500,000 for the other sections, especially the Sports and Culture.

ComScore was selected last year as the industry standard for the year 2012 by the Spanish online market by a large majority of media agencies, advertisers, digital media (traditional and Internet-born), commercial networks and Web portals. This measure is intended to put an end the previous confusion among advertisers and bring clarity to the national market.