New independent data from Similarweb has revealed that BBC News sites are the world’s most visited amongst traditional news publishers. March 2020 saw record figures for many news outlets but the figures reveal that the BBC’s online sites attracted the highest number of daily visits during the peak of the recent coronavirus pandemic in March and April 2020, outperforming its closest competitor, CNN.com, by 36 percent.

April 2020 was the second-highest month on record for BBC.com, with 158 million unique browsers, up 31 percent on the 12-month average.

In APAC, BBC.com recorded its highest ever number of unique browsers in March 2020 with 53 million. This represented an increase of 110% year-on-year as well as a monthly increase of almost half (+46 percent) from February 2020.

Figures also show that, although record audiences are flocking to the BBC from across APAC predominantly for news, they are staying to engage further with long-form feature sites – BBC Future, BBC Travel, BBC Culture, BBC Worklife, and BBC Reel. Across APAC the BBC’s features offerings saw a record number of unique browsers with an increase of 103 percent year-on-year for unique browsers and 82 percent YOY for page views.