OVER one million readers logged on to the Bournemouth Echo, Dorset Echo and Bridport News websites in February.

The three sites in Dorset attracted 1,126,422 readers – beating January’s record-breaking figure of 1,111,955.

The Bournemouth Echo recorded its second highest ever page impressions with 6,834,684 and 793,565 readers.

Rolling coverage of the storms chaos had readers flocking to the sites in February as we kept you up-to-date with the latest traffic and travel information, flood warnings and weather forecasts, plus our team on the ground delivered pictures and video footage of the events as they unfolded.

The Dorset Echo site recorded its highest ever number of page impressions with 2,511,828 and highest ever number of readers with 290,734, while the Bridport News achieved a record-breaking 180,111 page impressions and 42,123 readers.

Toby Granville group editor, said: “I’d like to thank every one of the 1,126,422 readers who visited our websites in February and made it an amazing record-breaking month.

“More and more readers are visiting our websites because our talented team of journalists are producing the very best exclusives – as well as reporting the big breaking stories online live from the scene all around the county.”

The landmark figures come hot on the heels of the latest data published by ABC which shows more people are visiting websites across the Newsquest media group network than any other regional news publisher. The figures revealed the number of daily readers accessing the publisher’s digital products has increased by 40.6% year on year.

Average daily readers across Newsquest’s regional news portfolio in the UK totalled 731,495 between July and December last year, compared to 520,256 in the same period of 2012.

It is the first time the publisher, which has 300 titles to its name, has outgrown rivals Johnston Press, Trinity Mirror and Local World.

Average monthly readers for the same period were 12,945,846, with a year-on-year growth of 41.9%.

From July to December 2013, the number of readers accessing the network of sites on a smart phone increased from 9.5m to 18.4 m (+93.6%), followed by Desktop from 31.6m to 36.1m (+14.4%) then tablet from 4.8m to 9.3m (+94.6%).

To find out about advertising opportunities contact the Daily Echo digital team on 01202 411422.