The Sun takes pole position in UK online newspaper websites

The News International-owned online newspaper The Sun, using Jade Goody's losing battle for survival against cancer and the Alfie Patten story as headlines, overtook four leading UK online newspaper websites and became the most popular online edition in the month of February.

Displacing its rivals, the Guardian.co.uk  and Times Online from the top for the first time, Audit Bureau of Circulation results showed that The Sun got 27.3 million unique visitors for the month of February, up from 21.9 million unique visitors in January.

The Sun's popularity rose in February by cleverly using the British reality TV star, Jane Goody, as headline news for the month of February.

Goody became popular with her not so popular racial outburst against Indian movie star, Shilpa Shetty in a TV reality show, but her fight against cervical cancer to which she succumbed last week, bought her to the media glare, which was used by The Sun cleverly as its headline news throughout February.

Along with Jane Goody's story, The Sun also ran the exclusive Alfie Patten story in the headlines. The now 13-year old Alfie Patten climbed the unpopularity ratings, when he claimed he had fathered a child when he was 12 years old, which was later disproved by DNA tests.

Since both the stories created a huge debate in the UK, one on the fight against cancer and the other about family values related to under-age sex, The Sun piped other online newspapers in strategically having these two stories as headlines while others, although carried the stories, but carried them in the inside pages.

Site editor Pete Picton said that apart from the Jade and Alfie story, the site redesign before Christmasas well as search and development manager Chris Chivrall's working around social media, by adding Digg buttons to story pages had paid off.

Most online publishers lost their rankings in February with The Guardian after a record breaking figure in January of nearly 30 million visitors, dropped to third place with 25.3 million visitors, down 15 per cent on January (See: Guardian website reaches record audience in January). 

Telegraph.co.uk  digital editor Edward Roussel said that the mistake they made early on was thinking that only speed and volume mattered, which was wrong as speed does matter, it is also the "quality of curation of content" that makes a good news organisation.

About 12 or 18 months ago, the Telegraph.co.uk gave prime importance to getting stories out, but now tagging, organising and curating stories and how you combine them with info-graphics or SEO has become the focus.

The Telegraph maintained its second position, with 26.2 million users, marginally up by 1 per cent on January figures.

Times Online had nearly 22 million visitors, which was down nearly 4 per cent while Mail Online, which includes Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday had 21.8 million visitors, down by 4.53 per cent.

The Mirror Group, having Mirror.co.uk, SundayMirror.co.uk  and People.co.uk  fared well with a rise with 6.99 million visitors, an increase of 5.12 per cent, but its UK visitors fell from 3.69 million in January to 3.64 million in February.