The Mail Online is the second most popular newspaper Web site in the United Kingdom, second only to the Guardian, according to data from the Audit Bureau of Circulation Electronic.

More than 11,865,000 unique visitors accessed Mail Online in July, according to traffic data released last week by ABCe. The site will join the Guardian, the Sun, the Times and the Telegraph in reporting monthly Web traffic.

The numbers show an 82 percent increase in users from over 6,518,000 in March, and a sizeable increase from March 2006, which ABCe found to be over 2,432,000 at that time, Journalism.co.uk reported.

Martin Clarke, editorial director of Mail Online, told Journalism.co.uk the site has been growing “incredibly quickly.”

“We only really got into this a year or so ago, so obviously we are very pleased because both our global and UK traffic have massively increased,” he is quoted as saying. “Every site has its different strengths and how you rank them depends on what metric you consider the most important, but whichever way you add them up, we are now one of the top five sites ... We're one of the big players now, and as far as we're concerned this is the foundation on which we build everything else.”