El País enjoys Internet lead in December

Google Ad Planner, comScore and Alexa, three of the chief trackers of Internet traffic, have confirmed the leadership of El País during the month of December 2010. Market tracker comScore reported that PRISA's newspaper had almost 4.8 million users in Spain, beating elmundo.es by more than 258,000. Google Ad Planner reported a similar gap, giving the online edition of El País 2.9 million readers in December 2010, compared to 2.6 million for elmundo.es. Alexa also confirms the upward trend for the online daily: for two months, El País has been ahead of its main competitor. Only Nielsen Online puts elmundo.es ahead of El País, and even then by just 144,000 monthly users in December.

News has been the key to the turnaround. The publication of the 250,000 leaks from U.S. embassies provided by Wikileaks aroused extraordinary interest from November 28 onwards, as can be seen in all the audience measurement systems. Coverage of the air traffic controllers' strike was the second most followed story. El País also registered a huge spike in user figures the day of the Christmas Lottery making it the most visited site in terms of unique users on December 22, according to Google Trends.

Source: EL PAÍS

Further information

User figures for December 2010 (in Spanish)