Online Newspapers Increase Exposure

Major U.S. newspaper websites are receiving more visitors, and those visitors are coming more often, in an otherwise difficult times for an industry struggling with declining exposure and revenues.
However, those visitors aren’t spending much time on the sites. They averaged slightly more than a half-hour at the top ten newspaper websites during all of December. The latest figures from Nielsen Online highlight the struggles that newspapers still confront with how to translate their audiences into revenues. So far, online ads aren’t strong enough to offset loses of the traditional sales from print and in-paper ads.

According to Nielsen, 40 million people in the US visited at least one of the top 10 newspaper sites in December, a 16% increase over last year. The New York Times remains the top newspaper site, with 18 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 6%. USA Today and The Washington Post follow. Nielsen said visitors were returning more often. Each visitor came, on average, 6.3 times in December, compared with 5.8 times a year earlier.

While heavy news consumers are spending more time at the sites, those sites also now get a lot more casual visitors. That makes the average visit relatively brief. The average time spent at the top 10 newspaper sites in December — 32.5 minutes — increased by just 2% from the same month in 2007. This 2% increase lags the 9% increase in time spent at all leading news sites, which include broadcasters’ sites and news sections at websites like Yahoo Inc. and AOL. In unique visitors, MSNBC, Yahoo, CNN and AOL all were ahead of The New York Times.

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