PubliCola readers seem interested in the future of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and newspapers in general. The Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard’s Nieman Institute is trying to sort out the post-print potential for journalism. The site ran two items about online newspaper readership this week that might interest you.
The site first reported the overall 2008 Web traffic numbers for the top 15 newspapers from Nielsen, a research firm that tracks online behavior using a very large panel of folks who agree to have their surfing habits tracked. The top paper in this count was the New York Times, no surprise, with nearly 20 million unique visitors on average each month. Neither Seattle paper hit the top 15, although I would guess the P-I is likely just off the bottom of this last, having scored in the top 30 in Nielsen’s December statistics.
Today, Nieman’s blog included a chart showing unique visitors across 2007 and 2008 by month that revealed trends for six major regional papers (as distinct from five national papers that Nieman analyzed yesterday).
The trend is for more readers across most publications. One of the arguments I made a few days about the P-I’s online future was that some analysts expect a lion’s share of traffic to a newspaper Web site results from print readers being referred there. Without the print edition, how much traffic would be lost? As newspapers have reduced coverage and even physical width, it’s a good sign to see that online growth remains strong.
(As an aside: Visitors to a Web site are counted differently than visits. A visit is a time-bounded series of sequential activities, like a session that someone spends on a site, and then leaves or goes idle for a while. A visitor is an ostensibly unique individual, bounded by how accurately a tracking organization can distinguish between the same people using different computers, or one computer used by different people. Because Nielsen uses a panel of individuals, its unique visitor numbers are likely more accurate–and lower–than those released by individual sites that don’t require subscriptions or membership. Page views, in contrast, are simply a count of Web pages, but not graphics, loaded by a visitor.)
