The Drum smashes record daily traffic number by more than double - and still counting
The Drum has attracted a record 373,000 daily unique visitors so far today, adding another milestone to a year of record-breaking traffic.
Rising: The Drum has smashed its previous traffic record
The figure is more than double the previous daily record of 191,852, recorded in April of this year, and with it continuing to rise the website may even reach its typical monthly unique visitors number in a single day.
Exactly a year ago, The Drum reported a record month for online traffic with 567,494 unique visitors for the month. However, this afternoon The Drum’s unique visitor counter sat at 373,000 and rising, and with 164,000 unique visits on Thursday, the site is on course to smash last year’s record for the month in just two days.
Today's traffic increase has been driven mainly by a story about a selfie-happy Russian soldier caught in rebel-held Ukranian territory thanks to the geo-tagging tool on his Instagram account.
The Drum’s recent traffic surge has been boosted by original video content such as the Shockumentary on shock advertising - which launched on Thursday night - and a recent documentary about the media coverage of the phone-hacking trial, Hacks on the Hacking Trial. Also this week, The Drum covered the launch of Hack Attack, the book on the phone-hacking scandal by the Guardian journalist Nick Davies, who broke the story.
Gordon Young, editor and co-founder of The Drum, said: “We’re delighted to see our content bringing in such a huge audience and we thank our ever-increasing number of readers.
“Across the board we’re always working hard to raise our game and we’re seeing the results of that – such as the Drum TV channel – reflected in our traffic to both the website and our YouTube platform.”
The Drum also recently crossed the 100,000 followers mark on Twitter, and online successes were recognised last month at the Association of Online Publishers (AOP) digital publishing awards, where the site took gongs for editorial team of the year and digital publishing company of the year.
Also last month, The Drum’s managing director, Diane Young, was named publishing innovator of the year at the PPA Awards in London.
Watch our recently-launched Shockumentary:
Or our phone-hacking trial documentary:
Or watch the Guardian's Nick Davies mocking Piers Morgan at his book launch: