The much-anticipated arrival of the royal baby brought a record day for BBC News Online on Monday, with a total of 19.4m unique browsers. This is our biggest day ever globally and our second biggest day ever in the UK, with 10.8m unique browsers.

Our previous record was 9 August 2011, during the riots in England. For the UK audience, that is still - narrowly - the biggest day ever. On that day there were 18.2m unique browsers, 10.9m of which came from the UK.

We also had a couple of record days on mobile - 9.2m mobile devices visited BBC News Online on Monday and 8.6m mobiles or tablets came to the site on Tuesday. Our previous record was 7.8m users during the Boston bombings.

These figures account for almost half of all visitors to the site on both days (just over 47%). The numbers of you using mobiles and/or tablets to visit the site have been steadily growing over the past year or so. Earlier this month we updated our mobile apps so that you can receive alerts on breaking news stories, and we've been working hard to provide the best service on mobile.

As you might expect, visits to the site peaked between 20:00 and 21:00 BST on Monday when the announcement was made that the royal baby was a boy. On Tuesday, traffic peaked between 19:00 and 20:00 BST, about the time the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge left the hospital to make their first public appearance with their new son.

Giles Wilson is features editor of BBC News Online

How it will appear on the iPhone...

We have updated our mobile apps (IOS and Android) so that app users can receive alerts when there are major breaking news stories.

We already provide breaking news alerts via SMS, email and Twitter, and we've been wanting to offer this service to our mobile app users for a while. It's one of the most commonly requested features for our apps so I'm very pleased that it's now available.

Push notifications arrive in a form similar to a text message, to alert you to breaking news even if you are not using the BBC News app at that moment. Our research tells us that users of our apps don't want to be inundated with alerts, so if you sign up for push notifications they will tell you only about the biggest breaking news stories - typically just one or two stories in 24 hours. If you want more than that, another option is to follow our @BBCBreaking account on Twitter where we report on a much wider range of the most significant breaking stories each day.

...and on Android-based phones

Once you receive a notification you can tap to find out more and your device will open your BBC News app on the relevant story, if it's available by then. At any time you can change your mind about receiving notifications, and you can change how you receive them (for example whether or not you want an audible alert) by updating your settings.

If you are unsure how to do that we have a help page for IOS and another for Android as they work in slightly different ways.

My colleague, Alex Perry, from the BBC Future Media News product team, explains more about the workings of push notifications, and the changes in our content production system which have made it easier and quicker for our journalists to send alerts to a range of platforms simultaneously, in a post on the BBC Internet blog, where you can add your comments and questions.

I hope you find this new addition to our apps useful.

This week we are making changes to our video pages in the UK to make our content easier to find, and to offer a consistent look and feel across different screen sizes.

The changes include:

• An increased number of clips to choose from on our video/audio pages
• Sections for related videos and top stories as well as more clips in each of the existing sections such as business and technology
• Content on the right-hand side of the player will be more relevant to the clip you are already watching
• Promoted clips now show duration and time of publication to give you more information when deciding whether to watch

We aim to roll the new pages out to our international audiences in the next few weeks.

My colleague Georgia Muir will be explaining the changes in more detail on the BBC Internet Blog next week, and we'd welcome your feedback on the new pages.

We have heard so much about the decline of established media brands that it is a rare occasion when one of them celebrates a milestone audience increase.

Yet that is just what the BBC can do today, with the news that a quarter of a billion people around the world are tuning into the BBC's global news service every week.

The Global Audience Estimate, released on Tuesday, shows that in the year 2012-13 the BBC's global news services - that is, the World Service, World News and the website bbc.com/news - reached 256m people each week, a rise of 7% or 16.6m.

These are huge figures - around the world, one in every 28 people is a viewer, listener or reader of BBC global news.

Eighty years after the BBC's Empire Services began broadcasting, its successor, the World Service, reaches 192 million people around the world, from Libya to Burma to Peru.

This is almost double the number of people who listened at the height of the Cold War, when the World Service was often the only source of objective news.

Today's media landscape - and indeed today's world - would of course be unimaginable to these previous listeners.

Although many people in the UK associate the World Service with radio, we now broadcast on television in eight languages, and online in all 27 World Service languages. Added to this are our commercially funded services, BBC World News and bbc.com/news.

So while radio remains the mainstay for our audiences, we are reaching out in new ways. Around the world, people are reading the news on smartphone apps, and watching news video on tablets. In Burma, where the BBC is playing a ground-breaking role, audiences are receiving news bulletins via audio bulletins on their mobile phones, and soon by text messages.

Smartphones are on the increase

Indeed, our digital services now reach an audience of 38 million every week, an increase of 8 million from last year. Mobile accounts for a large volume of this traffic.

Innovations like new apps and TV services have helped us stay relevant to our audience. But they would be meaningless without what I believe is the key to our success - the quality of our journalism.

Whatever media platform audiences use to access BBC news, what they will find is accurate, impartial, trustworthy journalism. In the past year BBC journalists have covered big and surprising stories ranging from the Pope's resignation, the Olympics, the US election - and the discovery of Richard III's skeleton in a Leicester car park.

A significant development this year saw BBC World News relaunched from our new state-of-the-art HD studios, with a refreshed line up of programmes and presenters, including Jon Sopel, Linda Yueh and Yalda Hakim.

Two of the other big factors in our audience increases have been the growth of our BBC Arabic and BBC Persian services.

BBC Arabic has increased its audience by 7m viewers, 6.5m of these in Egypt. The audience grew massively during the Arab Spring and has stayed high ever since.

For the first time the estimate measured audiences in Libya and Darfur. The BBC reaches nearly a quarter of the population in Darfur and 42% in Libya.

The audience for the BBC's Persian service is up by 90%. Despite continued censorship and satellite blocking, more than 40% of Iranians with a satellite dish watch the BBC. This service comes at considerable personal cost to our Persian service journalists, who, along with their families, face harassment, intimidation and even death threats from the Iranian authorities.

The BBC is subject to reporting restrictions in Iran

The last few years have been tough for the World Service, with repeated funding cuts, job losses and the closure of some of our language services. Today's good news comes despite, not because of this - our figures would be higher still were our journalism able to reach all the countries we did before.

But as our new director general Tony Hall has said, the BBC's best days lie ahead of us.

International broadcasting is a highly competitive business, which requires predictable, stable funding. The BBC Trust has announced the budget for the World Service will be better protected next year, when it moves to licence fee funding.

Monday saw another important step in this transition when the Trust published a consultation on the World Service's operating licence - and a document which, for the first time ever, sets out the World Service's purpose and identity.

PDF download World Service's purpose and identity_[123KB]

So I am hopeful for the future of global news. The move to our new headquarters earlier this year marked a new era for all of our global news services.

And the BBC's multi-lingual journalists are contributing their global insights on stories in Brazil, Russia, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Bangladesh to domestic BBC services as well. Eighty years after the BBC began its broadcasts to the world, the BBC is also now bringing the world back to Britain.