KIGALI - Shortly after featuring among the most visited websites on the African continent, The New Times web portal registered 13,178,261 hits last month alone. It literally means that readers of The New Times exceeded the country’s total population by over 2 million, as the newspaper’s online version grows by the day.At the beginning of this week, 8,254,317 had visited the website this month. The January statistics show the second biggest number of hits following the over 14 million hits in September and October 2010. February statistics indicate that on average, Wednesday is the day in the week when the www.newtimes.co.rw is most visited registering 563,575.33 hits, followed by Thursday with 510, 998.33 hits and Monday with 501,337.50 hits. The busiest time on website is between 7 a.m., and 9 a.m., 705,290 hits at 7am, 802,789 hits at 8 am and slightly dropping to 655,492 at 9am, indicating that most people in the country and region read the website first thing in the morning. Rwanda leads the pack of countries where The New Times is widely read, registering 3,231,720 hits, followed by United States with 1,246, 607 and Canada at 647,449 in January and February. Great Britain followed closely with 540,622, while on the African continent, South Africa leads with 164,793 hits. In the region, Uganda leads 18,216 followed by Kenya with 14,722. According to The New Times IT and Production Manager, Jean Pierre Twizeyimana, the growing trend is a result of the improved quality in content and a redesigned website. “Our website has continued to register a considerable amount of traffic in terms of visits and hits, whereby in December 2010 it had 12 million hits and more than 13 million in January 2011,” he said. “The trend keeps going up by the day. We hope by the end of this year we will have moved to the top 15 of the most visited websites on the continent,” said Twizeyimana. “The reason behind this growth is because the content has greatly improved in terms of quality and accuracy, and the new design implemented last year is more user-friendly. We are continuing to add more features to make it even better.” The New Times emerged among the top 25 news website in Africa in a survey conducted by 4International Media & Newspapers (4IMN) of Australia, this year. Ends
