UK: FT.com site traffic surges 250% on financial crisis

FT.com report that site traffic surged 250% due to the current financial crises, page views on the site on Thursday rose 300 per cent, and unique users increased 250 per cent compared to the same day last year.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of FT.com, told Journalism.co.uk, that the statistics were out of the ordinary and due to unusual circumstances, saying "It's not an exaggeration to say we've seen the biggest financial news days for well over 50 years. For all our journalists it has been a remarkable week.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations Electronic (ABCe) in March, report that unique users of FT.com have grown 32.9 per cent year-on-year.

Grimshaw went on to report, "Fortunately we have very robust systems and the site has performed very well over the past week and we haven't had any outages, or anything like that. Everything's held up and we're very pleased with the technical side."

These figures follow a report in the BBC's in-house magazine Ariel, which claimed the BBC online story 'Lehman Bros files for bankruptcy' received more than 1.7 million page views - the most popular story since the business site's birth ten years ago.

Source: Journalism.co.uk