`Irish Times' website busiest, figures show

The Irish Times on the Web has retained its position as Ireland's busiest website, according to figures from ABC//Electronic, the electronic section of the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

The latest audited figures show the website recorded 6.03 million page impressions last month and the site was visited 2.13 million times by 645,556 users.

The figures represent an increase of 1.78 million page impressions, 810,000 visits and 249,425 users over the corresponding period in 1997.

Page impressions, defined as requests for a Web page from an Internet server, have replaced "hits" as the preferred unit for measuring the traffic to websites.

The October audit also shows an increase of 40,000 page impressions, 24,833 users and 580,000 visits over the figures for March 1998.

March has traditionally been the busiest month for The Irish Times on the Web due to extra interest from readers abroad in the build-up to St Patrick's Day.

Only one other Irish newspaper website, the Belfast Telegraph, which runs at 1.5 mil

lion page impressions a month, provides independently audited figures.

In September, The Irish Times on the Web won the prize for Information Excellence at the Golden Spider Irish Inter net awards.

Earlier this month, it won the award for Best Content European Interactive Publishing awards in Zurich.

With the addition of Euro times, a section devoted to information on the European Union and the advent of the single currency, and an enhanced Sports Extra section, The Irish Times on the Web now offers its readers more than a dozen sections in addition to reproducing each day's newspaper in World-Wide-Web format.

Irish Ancestors, a section in which users can become involved in on-line genealogical research, has been a major commercial success with users, mainly from the United States, making payments for information over the Internet.

In a citation for the European Interactive Publishing awards one member of the international jury described Irish Ancestors as "the perfect site".

Other sections singled out for special mention in Zurich were the Path to Peace, a comprehensive guide to the Northern Ireland peace process, and Dyoublong, a section devoted to the writings of James Joyce.