Almost three-quarters of traffic to the BBC Sport website now comes from mobile and tablet devices, the corporation’s latest statistics have revealed.
Spurred on by a busy festive period including full football schedules on Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, the site attracted its highest number of UK daily unique browsers outside of the London 2012 Olympics.
New Year’s Day attracted 6.6 million unqiue browsers, beating the previous non-Olympics record of 6.5m when Andy Murray won his Wimbledon semi-final last summer. In addition, total weekly traffic over the festive period (December 25 to January 1) was up 23% year-on-year.
Mobiles contributed over 3 million unique browsers on Boxing Day – breaking the 3m milestone for the first time – before setting a new record on New Year’s Day with 3.1m unique browsers. Tablets also set a record of 1.3m unique browsers on Boxing Day before passing the 1.5m barrier for the first time on New Year’s Day.
As an overall proportion, that represented a record 72% of total UK BBC Sport traffic on Boxing Day and 70% on New Year’s Day.
Chris Condron, head of product for BBC Sport, said: “These figures highlight just how essential hand-held devices have become to our audiences.
“We’ve seen this trend grow throughout the year, culminating in record figures over the festive period when tablets and mobiles are a popular gift in many homes across the UK. We’ll continue to iterate and improve our digital services throughout a massive year of sport in 2014, making sure people get the best possible experience on any device they want, wherever they want.”
