The website of The Irish Times, ireland.com, recorded an increase of more than 230 per cent in traffic in the year to last March, according to audit figures.
The latest traffic figures also show that ireland.com is the first site in the State to attract more than one million individual users in a one-month period.
According to ABC Electronic - the leading electronic media auditing bureau - the website recorded 16.7 million page impressions, or web page accesses, in March of this year, up 232 per cent on the same period last year.
The number of individual users accessing the site also doubled to 1.16 million.
This compares with 585,000 users in March 1999 and 668,000 in October 1999.
ireland.com remains the busiest Irish website, with its nearest competitor, Yahoo!, recording page impressions of just under 15 million, while the low fares airline, Ryanair, claims about eight million page accesses. The latest figures for RTE show page impressions of about five million.
The figures represent an increase of 9.5 million page impressions in a 12-month period, jumping from 7.2 million in March 1999 and 10.2 million last October.
St Patrick's Day is traditionally ireland.com's busiest day, and this year more than 100,000 people accessed the site on March 17th.
The editor of The Irish Times, Mr Conor Brady, welcomed the news, saying: "The Irish Times is in the remarkable position now of seeing simultaneous growth both in the sales of its print editions and in its web-readership."
He added: "With the expansion of our Breaking News service, The Irish Times is effectively publishing 18 hours a day. It's moving towards the ideal of a multimedia publication."
Mr Nick Chapman, managing director of Irish Times Ltd, said: "These are outstanding results and hugely encouraging. They show that ireland.com is moving strongly in the right direction and they give us the confidence to grow our investment in Internet services as an essential part of our cross-media strategy for The Irish Times."
Mr Seamus Conaty, managing director of the Irish Times New Media Division, paid tribute to the dedication of staff at the website, describing the figures as an "outstanding result".
Mr Conaty attributed much of the success of the site to improved speed of access. "When we launched our co-location servers in New York and London, we did expect a significant increase in traffic as we had been exceeding our previous bandwidth," he said. "But this far surpasses expectations and provides a great platform for future growth."
ireland.com now ranks fourth in terms of numbers of users - after BBC Online News, Interactive Investor International and Virgin Net - of ABC Electronic-audited sites in Britain and Ireland.
The second-busiest Irish site audited by ABC Electronic was the Belfast Telegraph, with just over 1.6 million page impressions. The Guardian newspaper's website, Guardian Unlimited, has recorded 10.2 million page impressions in its most recent audit, while the Electronic Telegraph had 15 million.
ABC Electronic, the electronic arm of the non-profit newspaper auditing group, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, audits 140 Internet sites in Ireland and Britain.
Audit certification is based on census measurements that reflect total activity on a site by measuring, from a site's log files, the number of pages viewed on that site.
This differs from the approach taken by other research companies. Earlier this week, Neilsen//NetRatings released findings on Irish Internet usage, based on a sample of home users deemed to be representative of all Irish Internet users.
ireland.com has been Ireland's most visited website since it was started as The Irish Times on the Web in 1994.
In March 1999 the site substantially improved the range of services with the start of ireland.com, a vertical interest site aimed at Irish people and those with an interest in all things Irish. ireland.com provides a range of sites and services including news, entertainment and lifestyle and free Web-based e-mail.
Most recently, it introduced an enhanced Breaking News service, a site to accompany the newspaper's revamped education supplement EL, online exam seminars and improved Irish share price services.
While several new sites are planned in coming months, sites to be launched in the coming weeks include Dyoublong, to celebrate Bloomsday, a site dedicated to the Euro 2000 soccer championship and a revamped Business site.
