In early May, it will be two years since Neatkarīgā was transformed from a printed newspaper into a high-quality digital daily. In that time, we have more than doubled the audience of Neatkarīgā. In March 2022, according to Google Analytics, 620,000 unique users visited Neatkarīgā alone.
It should be recalled that the number of unique users is actually the number of unique devices on which Neatkarīgā is read. The total number of readers is slightly lower because there are readers who use mobile phones, and also home or work computers. Each such device is counted as a unique user. The 620,000 unique users are only those who opened at least one article in Neatkarīgā. The combined audience of Neatkarīgā and nra.lv is considerably larger, as Neatkarīgā publishes commentaries, opinions, interviews, research and other articles with similar content, while nra.lv publishes a constant (24 hours a day) stream of the latest news.
One of the significant achievements of the last two years is that, by switching to a digital format, Neatkarīgā has gained a completely new audience - Latvian diaspora readers around the world, both those Latvians whose ancestors moved to other countries in the 19th and 20th century emigration waves, those Latvians who left Latvia during the economic difficulties at the beginning of the 21st century, as well as those who are abroad for study or work. Currently, 87% of all unique users who read Neatkarīgā come from Latvia, and 13% from abroad
According to statistics compiled by the Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs, as of January 1, 2022, the largest number of Latvian nationals live in the UK (87.3 thousand), Germany (23.9 thousand), Ireland (22.0 thousand) and the USA (16.5 thousand). Between four and six thousand Latvian nationals live in Australia, Norway, Sweden, Israel, Canada, Russia and the Netherlands. Between two and three thousand Latvian nationals lived in Denmark, France, Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Belgium and Estonia.
However, it is Latvians living in the USA who read Neatkarīgā the most. 3.2% of all unique users of Neatkarīgā come from the USA. There are also significant numbers of readers in the UK (2.2%), Germany (1.2%), Sweden (0.9%), Norway (0.9%) and Ireland (0.8%). A fairly large number of readers also come to Neatkarīgā from the Netherlands (0.4%), Finland (0.4%) and Estonia.
These data refer only to the Latvian language edition of Neatkarīgā. The English edition of Neatkarīgā is the most popular among people located in Latvia who cannot read in Latvian. A significant number of readers of the English edition of Neatkarīgā come from Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and many Eastern European countries.