Financial turmoil sees surge in BBC News website traffic

A tumultuous week in the financial markets led to a surge in traffic to the BBC News website's business section in January.

Between the 20 and 26 January – which saw the business world rocked by revelations of a rogue trader at Societe General, chaos on the stock market and interest rate cuts – the business section alone pulled in 5.4 million readers – up on usual figures by 36% for the UK and up by 50% for the world edition.

The section also generated 35.1m page views that week – up 53% on UK users and 52% for international readers seeking news on the latest developments.

On Tuesday 22 January – a day of turmoil on the stock market and the day the Federal Reserve bank announced interest rates cuts – traffic reached an all-time high in a single day with 2.1m readers and 8.1m page views.

The average time spent per visitor on the business pages also increased with visitors spending an average of 11.34 minutes on the UK site – up nearly 30%.

Peter Horrocks, BBC News Head of the BBC's Multimedia Newsroom, said: "I'm pleased that the excellent reports by Evan Davis, Robert Peston and our colleagues in BBC business news are reaching a growing online audience."

Tim Weber, Editor of the BBC News Business section, said: "I'm pleased that during a time of economic and market instability we are meeting our audience's hunger for clear and balanced information – whether they are investors, employers, consumers or employees."

Total unique users and page views for the whole of the BBC News website during the week 20-26 January were higher than average with 16.5m unique users generating 258m page views. The business pages making up a third of users and about one seventh of the total pages viewed.

The BBC News website is the UK's number one News website and generates 1 billion page views per month, with an average of 13m unique users every week.