RT Online in 05

RT Online in 2015

28 January 2016: Marriage Equality Referendum, All Ireland Football Final, Late Late Toy Show and Gay Byrnes interview with Stephen Fry among RT s biggest digital stories in 2015

The Marriage Equality Referendum, major sporting events, including the All Ireland Football Final and RBS Six Nations Final, The Late Late Toy Show and Gay Byrne's interview with Stephen Fry for The Meaning of Life were among the top RT digital stories and content in 2015, in figures released by RT today. The tragic events in Berkeley California, and Carrickmines, Dublin, were also closely followed by audiences online and on mobile.

The day of the Marriage Equality Referendum count (Saturday, 23rd May 2015) was the single biggest day for online traffic to RT 's digital news platforms, with almost one million (977,000) unique browsers visiting RT .ie and the RT News Now app that day, clocking up 6.8 million page views.

The second busiest day of the year for RT 's digital news platforms was Sunday, 11th October 2015 with 871,000 unique browsers and 6.5 million page views, when news broke of the tragic killing of Garda Tony Golden in Co. Louth. That day, sports fans also watched coverage and analysis of the Poland V Ireland game and France v Ireland Rugby World Cup game on RT 's digital platforms. Budget 2016 on 13th October 2015 was the third busiest day of the year with 834,000 unique browsers and 6.1 million page views.

The tragic events at Berkeley and Carrickmines were the most-read news articles in 2015 with almost one million views (913,000) and 686,000 page views respectively. The Marriage Equality Referendum count received 668,000 page views. The sports articles with the highest traffic was the 6 Nations Final live tracker article with 452,000 page views and the Dublin versus Kerry All Ireland Football Final live tracker article with 350,000 page views.

The surprise hit of 2015 was the RT .ie news article Health warning over drying washing indoors . The article received two spikes in traffic during 2015, having being picked up on social media across Asia in January 2015 and again towards the end of the year, when it went viral on Facebook. Teresa Mannion's famous weather report Don't make unnecessary journeys also spiked in December, with the original report and the subsequent mash-ups going viral. RT 's special Christmas Eve message Santa is on his way , was viewed over 285,000 times in a 12 hour period on 24th December.

Reach of RT 's digital news platforms:

In 2015, RT .ie, Ireland's number one media site attracted an average of 5.5 million unique browsers per month. With the majority of people accessing RT 's online services via mobile and tablet, now over 80% of RT 's online traffic is now on mobile devices, a significant change in the last number of years, with more people accessing breaking news and analysis on the move. RT 's news app RT News Now, the number one news app in Ireland with 1.5 million downloads to date, had 176,000 downloads in 2015 and following a refresh of the app in August, page views increased by 31% between August and December 2015.

RT Player:

RT Player, Ireland's number one broadcaster video-on-demand service, served over 40 million streams across the year, with an average of 1.35 million unique browsers and 3.35 million streams per month. The RT Player app has over 1.84 million downloads. Connected TVs are an increasingly popular device to watch RT Player on, with 51,000 streams on Connected TVs over the Christmas period.

February and March were the busiest month for RT Player, driven by the RBS 6 Nations, Cheltenham Festival, Eastenders' Who killed Lucy Beale' special and live episodes and Conor McGregor's The Notorious proving to be a huge knock out hit. Across the year, the soaps (Eastenders, Fair City, Home & Away and Neighbours), as well as RT News, The Late Late Show and The Sunday Game Live were the most popular shows on RT Player. The Late Late Toy Show attracted the highest number of streams of any show across the year with 180,000 streams. Web extra and exclusive content on RT Player from The Late Late Show, The Sunday Game, RBS 6 Nations, Storyland, Comedy Bites and the new chat show The Couch performed very well, attracting over 1.4 million streams in 2015. RT Player's new Doc Hub is also proving popular, featuring a large collection of home-grown Irish documentaries.

RT 's Apps:

Usage of RT 's apps continued to soar in 2015. RT 's stable of eleven apps across news, TV, radio and children's content have to date been downloaded over 4 million times.

RT 's radio apps including RT Radio Player, RT Radio 1, RT 2fm, RT Radio 1's Documentary on One are hugely popular with combined downloads of 682,000. The top five on demand radio content across the year was RT Radio 1's Documentary on One (30th May), Liveline (23rd October), Liveline (9th June), The Marian Finucane Show (17th October) and Liveline (10th July).

RT Goes Viral:

In 2015, RT 's You Tube Channel saw many viral hits. Demonstrating the true meaning of viral was Gay Byrne's interview with Stephen Fry on The Meaning of Life. The clip featuring Gay Byrne's interview with Stephen Fry regarding his views on God went viral, clocking up an impressive 6.6 million views. The promo for Conor McGregor's show The Notorious had also one of the highest views on RT 's YouTube Channel with 239,045 views.

RT 's International Reach:

As well as serving domestic audiences, RT attracts and serves international audiences. On average 25% of RT .ie traffic is from international audiences and 30% of traffic to RT 's radio apps was from international listeners in 2015. In the last 18 months, RT has launched two bespoke services for international aud

LINK:	http://www.rte.ie/about/en/press-office/press-releases/2016/0128/76365...
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