TheGuardian.com Traffic Surges By 671,389.5% In One Year

No, that is not a typo, at least not according to the blog of traffic counting website Compete.com, which notes that with 7.1 million unique visitors, the website of the newspaper that broke the Edward Snowden scandal and has been covering the NSA's spying scandal has seen an unprecedented increase in traffic. Granted the Y/Y number is an aberation due to the switchover from Guardian.co.uk to an impartial dot com address, but either way, as Compete notes, just "Guardian.co.uk over the recent months also shows that the news outlet had their best month for unique visitors (UVs) in two years."

From Compete:

TheGuardian.com saw explosive growth in August as the popular online newspaper moved from Guardian.co.uk on July 30 to TheGuardian.com. Comparing TheGuardian.com in August to Guardian.co.uk over the recent months also shows that the news outlet had their best month for unique visitors (UVs) in two years. Using Compete PRO, we can see that Americans were driven to The Guardian for their perspective on the current events in Syria with the keyword “syria” being the eighth most popular keyword for driving traffic to TheGuardian.com.

So for all those legacy newspapers and websites lamenting the drop in advertising revenues, subscriptions and/or eyeballs, here is a simple solution - break a story that is not pandering to the establishment and actually exposes the dirt behind the "pristine" facade.

That, or post many more slideshows with cats.