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Metro.co.uk has reported its ABC data only once or twice a year since its debut figure in March 2006 with 12,157 unique users. But in 2011 it has stepped up its audits to report every two months since the start of the year.

In January it recorded 238,240 daily average browsers, rising to 255,394 in March, and 310,762 in May.

It did not publish a July figure last year, thwarting year-on-year comparisons, but it published a March 2010 figure of 177,747.

Out of its nearly eight million monthly visitors last month 4,208,958 were in the UK and 3,778,299 were overseas.

Despite the impressive growth, Metro.co.uk remains a minnow in the national newspaper website school, attracting less than a 10th of the traffic of the biggest fish MailOnline.

The Metro's stablemate remained the UK’s most popular newspaper website, and recovered some of the traffic it lost between May and June.

It recorded a 4.4% rise on June's daily average browser figure to 4,239,304, which was a year-on-year rise of 70%.

Guardian.co.uk remained the nation's second biggest site, drawing a daily average of 2,810,046 browsers in July in a month-on-month increase of 7.5%. Like MailOnline, this put it just shy of the record figure it achieved in May.

Telegraph Media Group's Telegraph.co.uk recorded 1,965,481 daily users, with a relatively subdued 2.2% month-on-month rise. Its total for the whole of July was 38,267,801.

Last month Mirror Group Digital stuck out as the only national newspaper website (although it is a collection of sites including Mirror.co.uk and 3am.co.uk) not to record a fall in its audience since May.

Its monthly growth slowed to 1% in July as it recorded a daily average browser figure of 737,494, its highest to date.

The Independent was the only faller this month, dropping 0.6% from June to 622,543, some way off its record figure of 675,129 in May.