Catalan News surpasses 1 million unique users again in 2021

Catalan News ended another remarkable year on Friday consolidating its position as a trusted news source among English speakers living in Catalonia and elsewhere across the globe.

The audience figures at the end of 2021 show that the all-time high number of people who used this media outlet in 2020, coinciding with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, have remained loyal to the project.

Catalan News is very proud of the 1,117,910 unique users it saw in 2021, which for the second year in a row surpasses the one million threshold and almost doubles pre-pandemic levels.

The same trend is observed in page views, which surpass 5 million like in 2020, and stand at 5,408,792 in the past 12 months.

The days with most website traffic coincides with the peak of the several Covid waves that Catalonia has faced this year – indeed, January 4, the day a municipality-level lockdown and a closure of shops was announced in order to stop the third wave, hit the high number of visits this year, at 17,298 unique users.

December 21, the day the government imposed the third curfew of the year, was the day with the second-most traffic on Catalan News, with 15,167.

Both figures are higher than historic days in the country, such as October 1, 2017, when an independence referendum not authorized by Spain was held.

Most read articles

Our most-read articles this year were the one containing all the graphs of the Covid-19 figures, our guide with the most updated restrictions applying to Catalonia to fight the virus, and our story with the graphs showing the progression of the vaccine rollout.

The delay in Sagrada Família's completion beyond 2026 and the tweets and songs for which rapper Pablo Hasel was imprisoned, igniting riots in Barcelona, were other successful stories this year.

Visitors to our site

Over two-thirds of our page views, 70%, were from people who are native-English speakers, and our main audience this year was made up of people who reside in Spain (38% of all unique visitors), followed by the United Kingdom (14%), and the United States (12%).

The Catalan News was able to meet some of their readers in 2021 for the first time, thanks to its breakthrough participation in the Barcelona International Community Day fair. 

Podcast

2021 was also the year Catalan News consolidated its weekly podcast, 'Filling the Sink', which can be found on the Catalan News website as well as Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Google Podcasts.

Its 59 episodes have been downloaded over 48,000 times since the project launched in late October 2020 – around 5,000 of these have been made through the Catalunya Ràdio platform.

Named after the Catalan expression "de mica en mica, s'omple la pica" (literally, "little by little, the sink fills up," though perhaps best translated as "slowly but surely"), host Lorcan Doherty tackles current issues with our reporters and special guests, from Covid-19 to traditions, politics, current social debates, and Catalan language and culture.

Get in touch

We would like to extend our thanks to our readers for placing their trust in us—we definitely would not have been able to do this without you all.  

For any comments or questions, you can always contact our newsroom through the email address catalannews@acn.cat.

If you wish, you can also sign up for our weekly newsletter, delivering some of the biggest stories of the week gone by every Monday, by clicking the 'Newsletter' button at the top of the page.