Clear winners among newspaper websites after Olympics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/sep/23/newspaper-circulation-winners-olympics

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For round one of the great Olympics standoff, Times circulation went up 0.9% in August against 0.49% for the Daily Telegraph – but the Telegraph, angry at seeing gold medals going the Thunderer's way, demanded a recount. Round two, however, is much simpler. Which newspaper website posted the biggest ABC-audited August rise?

Well, the unstoppable Mail Online vaulted to well over 105 million monthly browsers, or 6.56 million a day (a 7.01% rise on July). But was that all because of the Games – or sundry celeb games on the side? The Guardian, with a 10.5% jump in daily browsers, had good cause to be happy – though its month-on-month rise back in August 2011 was 8.85% without any Olympics to cover, so context cools euphoria. And the Telegraph had another good month, up 5.76%, that just wasn't as good as 9.39% jump in August last year.

All of which, plus an astonishing 22.45% bound in Indy browsing, probably only tells you two things. That news, like Olympic news, sells copies, clicks open pages and keeps the wheels of reader interest turning. And that, on the reader-accumulating front at least, the Telegraph wiped the floor with the Times. For the Times, behind its paywall blocks, revealed no figures and so did not start.

■ First those pictures were in a French magazine: and so on to Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and all points of the compass (including, of course, cyberspace). Has legal action in France staunched the spread? On the contrary, it's provided the oxygen of publicity. Will prosecuting the paparazzo who used a long lens in Provence help? Not if it challenges other snappers to pursue the same royal quarry. The interesting thing when William and Kate first talked about legal action was the number of British media lawyers – normally turkey farmers panting for Christmas – who said openly that this wasn't the brightest notion. And it looks as though they were right.