Royal Baby: birth news gives British newspaper websites boost

The birth of Prince William and Kate Middleton's first child - third in line to the throne - gave the websites of British newspapers their biggest online news day of the year so far.

The birth of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's baby boy provided Mail Online with its biggest ever audience, while UK traffic to newspaper and other media websites rose almost 50%, making it the biggest online news day of the year so far.

Mail Online recorded 10.57 million unique users on Monday, according to unofficial internal figures - 1 million more than its previous published record achieved covering the Boston marathon bombing in April, the Guardian newspaper reported citing a research.

UK web traffic to news and media websites hit 94 million unique users on Monday - the average is 64 million - ahead of the Boston bombings (85 million) and Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee (57 million).

Mail Online received the biggest share of visits from UK web users on Monday, according to the research by Experian Marketing Services.

It was followed by the websites of the Sun, which is set to go behind a paywall from next week, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and Independent.

Tabloid newspapers (including the Mail Online) received twice as much traffic as quality titles (including to Times Online and the Financial Times, both behind paywalls).

The Independent was the only UK newspaper site to see a week-on-week decline in share of visits, according to data from EMS. This also proved to be true for CNN.Com (-3 per cent) and the website of the New York Times (-7 per cent).

After more than 10 hours of labour, 31-year-old Kate gave birth to a future king on Monday night.