Dezeen attracted record audiences in 2020 with unique website visitors up 16 per cent, social media followers up 17 per cent and newsletter subscribers up 11 per cent.

As Dezeen enters its 15th year, this means that we have achieved audience growth every year since we launched in 2006, cementing our position as the world's most popular and influential architecture and design site.

A huge thank-you to all our readers and subscribers for helping us achieve our best-ever stats in such a difficult year! Our office (above) remained empty for most of 2020 as the team worked from home.

VDF and pandemic coverage drove audience growth

Last year, our coverage of the coronavirus pandemic helped us attract new readers with traffic up around 20 per cent compared to 2019 in the spring.

Standout content we published during 2020 included Virtual Design Festival, the world's first-ever online design festival, which brought the design world together during the early days of the pandemic and attracted 1.75 million page views and two million video plays.

Six awards

The year ended with Dezeen winning six awards. Three of these were for Virtual Design Festival with our Dezeen Day conference scooping another and founder Marcus Fairs winning the digital leadership prize at IBP's annual journalism awards ceremony.

In addition, Dezeen Awards was named best sector-specific awards programme at the Awards Awards.

Website traffic

Unique visitors ("users" in Google Analytics parlance) to the Dezeen website grew 17 per cent to 32.1 million. Page views grew to 110 million and sessions were up nine per cent to 61 million.

Last year also saw our best-ever month for traffic, with 3.65 million unique visitors in March, while our interview with Li Edelkoort on the impact of coronavirus the same month was our most popular story of all time, with over 800,000 page views.

Social media

Our total social media audience across all platforms grew 17 per cent to 6.4 million. The biggest growth was on Instagram, where we gained 633,00 new followers, taking us to 2.9 million. Our LinkedIn following almost doubled, growing 93 per cent to 224,000.

Our followings on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and WeChat also grew strongly.

Newsletters

Subscribers to our weekly and daily newsletters grew 11 per cent to 532,466 in total. Weekly subscribers grew 16 per cent to 355,542 while daily subscribers grew 7.5 per cent to 177,000.

Video

Our video content received 21 million plays in total across YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Our YouTube subscribers grew 35 per cent to 176,000 and video plays on YouTube grew to 8.7 million.

Comments

Comments from readers grew slightly to 28,480, beating 2019's previous record tally by just 14 comments. This confirms our position as the architecture and design website with the most active comments section.

Photography is by Ed Reeve.