Online Newspaper Growth Continues to Impress

The top 10 newspapers in the US collectively saw a 16% year-over-year increase in unique visitors to their websites in 2008, as well as a 27% increase in the total number of overall visits, according to data from Nielsen Online.

The number of unique visitors grew from 34.6 million unique visitors in December 2007 to 40.1 million in December 2008.

NYTimes.com (NYT) was the #1 online newspaper destination in December 2008, with 18.2 million unique visitors. USATODAY.com (GCI) and washingtonpost.com (WPO) took the #2 and #3 spots, with 11.4 million and 9.5 million unique visitors, respectively, Nielsen Online reported.

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The New York Daily News online edition experienced the highest growth in unique visitors (99%), while Boston.com was the only online newspaper to experience a decline (-6%).

“Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth,” said Chuck Schilling, research director, agency & media, Nielsen Online. “News coverage in December ranged from how the 2008 holiday season would be affected by the weakening economy to Obama’s latest nomination for his administration, all of which helped to drive this impressive growth.”

Online Newspaper Readers Visiting More Frequently

In addition to an increased number of unique visitors to newspaper sites, readers also are frequenting these these web destinations more often than they were a year ago. The number of total visits to the top 10 newspaper sites increased 27% year-over-year, growing from 199.6 million in December 2007 to 252.7 million in December 2008.

“Despite the current troubles for the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper sites more and more often to stay on top of current events,” said Schilling. “The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue.”

Comments

[Robert Ivan]

"NYTimes.com (NYT) was the #1 online newspaper destination in December 2008, with 18.2 million unique visitors."

And they still can't make enough money to break even. Why?
Average Display Ad price for News sites:

* Fell from an average price of $0.53 in Q4 2007 to $0.34 in Q4 2008 – a 36% drop.
* Fell from an average price of $0.36 in Q3 2008 to $0.34 in Q4 2008 – a 5.6% drop.

Pursuing growth is not an economically sustainable business strategy. Newspapers need to focus on innovating their revenue streams. www.metaprinter.com/?p...

2009 Feb 03 06:34 PM

[Mad Hedge Fund Trader]

Looks like the San Francisco Chronicle may be about to join the dustbin of history. The industry rag, Editor and Publisher, says that the privately owned Hearst Corporation has given the venerable paper an ultimatum to cut costs or close. The 150 year old Chronicle lost $50 million last year. Of course, this may all be a ploy just to beat up one of the last surviving unions, but they have made a similar threat to their paper in Seattle. Ironically, Hearst acquired the Chronicle and dumped the San Francisco Examiner in 2,000, which was then put on a crash diet and made profitable by its new owners. If the Chronicle goes it will join the Philadelphia Enquirer which went under last week, and the soon to be shut Christian Science Monitor. Google has been eating their lunch for years, and classified ads have migrated to Craig's List. It is tough to chop down a forest to make paper, get a union to print it, and manually distribute your product, and then compete against a one man email blast on costs. If the Chronicle goes it will be survived by a much smaller SFGate.com, one of the most successful web based newspaper portals out there. There could be a ninth earning save by a surprise buyer. But moguls willing to hemorrhage money just to promote a political view are a dying breed. Rupert Murdoch has been the only recent buyer of newspapers, and something tells me that a match with the Chronicle would not exactly be one made in Heaven. In five years there will probably be only two mass circulation papers left, The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, with the Washington Post as an outlyer. Thousands of small, local, niche publications will take up the slack. As a long time print journalist dating back to the typewriter days myself, I am sad to see newspapers go. But you can’t exactly sit like Denmark’s old King Canute and order the tide to stop rising. Journalism is degrading into an army of guys banging away at the computers at 3:00 AM in their boxer shorts. Trust, accuracy, objectivity, style, and taste will be the victims.

2009 Feb 26 12:16 PM