LONDON: While circulations and readership erode at Britain's hard-copy newspaper titles, it's a different story online according to the Newspaper Marketing Agency.

According to the latter's just-launched measurement tool NOA (Newspaper Online Analytics) there were 94.8 million unique visitors to the websites of Britain's sixteen national newspapers in June 2008 – only 37% (35.5m) of whom were UK-based.

NOA reports will be published monthly from now on, providing deduplicated data that ensures visitors to multiple sites are counted only once.

News pages are the most popular online port of call, attracting more than a third of all unique visitors. The most popular entry points are the sites' home pages, although two thirds of surfers access online newspapers via other sources.

Google is the top referrer to newspaper sites, but 22 million unique visitors go directly to the newspaper websites. 

Online newspaper users are younger and more affluent than the average online user, and more likely to be male and ABC1, the NMA reports. They also spend more time online, visit more sites, and spend more money.

Data sourced from mad.co.uk; additional content by WARC staff