When we launched Club El Nacional last October 1st, we explained that we had a three-fold aim: to deepen our relationship with our readers; to strengthen their sense of belonging and their support for the journalism we practice; and to create a community of supporters of the newspaper and its editorial line. All this so as to maintain it, as up till now, with access totally free. With this business move we sought to preserve the freedom of the newspaper as much as possible, to try to place it in a position of leadership among the press in Catalonia and to editorially protect our particular view of the country from external threats or advertising boycotts.
Today we have to humbly acknowledge that we were unable to foresee a tsunami like the coronavirus crisis which, just as it has hit so many sectors of society, has heavily impacted on the media through the absence of advertising spending, one essential source of income for the digital press. Advertising revenue in the second half of March and the first half of April has plummeted, with these two periods down 67% and 56% respectively from last year's figures, and there is nothing visible on the horizon which suggests that this situation can be reversed in the short term. In any case, great damage is being done by the crisis triggered by the global pandemic, even though we are still confident that the final quarter of this year will reverse the current trend and return some hope to the outlook.
We subscribers need to be many more in number to make possible the newspaper we all want
The current situation is indeed paradoxical, as it comes at a time of unparalleled boom in the consumption of digital media as the communication channel which is most used to follow all coronavirus news and the evolution of the pandemic. The digital press, along with radio, has met the enormous challenge of keeping the public informed of everything that is going on while they are stuck in lockdown, a situation that continues as you read.
In March, El Nacional reached the highest-ever audience in its short history since March 2016, reaching, according to the OJD's audience monitoring, 12.7 million unique users and almost 83 million pageviews. The previous peak was 9.5 million unique users and coincided with the events of last October in Catalonia, when the Supreme Court's ruling on the political prisoners was given. We are very pleased with the combined efforts being made by the newspaper as a whole which, according to OJD, triples the next-ranked Catalan competitor in audience.
This effort, and our pursuit of overall leadership in OJD and ComsCore, among both newspapers that are digital natives and those that originated in printed editions, are at risk due to a sharp decline in advertising revenue. A significant part of the editorial staff of El Nacional and its collaborators will already notice the effects this April, as do many other sectors of society. We will try to keep growing, to expand the influence of the newspaper and to make more and more people feel that this is their media of reference, in order not to miss this unique opportunity to turn around a Catalan media map which for decades has remained substantially unchanged.
This is our commitment and we need El Nacional's family to become steadily bigger and express its support by joining the Club El Nacional. We subscribers need to be many more in number to make possible the newspaper we all want as quickly as possible. This is the goal and the commitment.