Woe is the future of newspapers – not
The Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer are among the most-visited newspaper Web sites in the country.
Next time a Seattle Times or Seattle Post-Intelligencer friend gives me a tale of woe about the future of their newsrooms, in light of either the seemingly declining fortunes of newspapers generally or of theirs in particular, I'm going to whip out this Editor & Publisher article about the February Nielsen//NetRatings ranking of the 30 most popular U.S. newspaper Web sites.
The Times comes in 17th and the P-I is 19th. If you were to combine their Web sites' traffic, Seattle would rank fifth, ahead of The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe (Boston.com), and the Chicago Tribune, to name three of several heavyweights. Metro Puget Sound is the 14th-biggest media market in the country.
In February, 1.8 million browsers visited the Times site at least once and viewed a combined 18.6 million Web pages. The P-I had 1.7 million unique visitors and 13.0 million page views. The only other Northwest paper of comparable size is Portland's Oregonian (OregonLive.com), which didn't make the top 30. (Sorry, don't know how the ranking goes after that.)
The New York Times was first by a wide margin with almost 13 million site visitors and 455.5 million page views.
That's a lot of banner ads.
Stop the presses! Sell the trucks! Stop buying newsprint! That 19th century overhead is what's killing newspapers, not the Internet.
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Comments:
Posted Tue, Apr 10, 2:27 p.m. inappropriate
Well, yes but ...: The P-I and Times sites have lots of traffic but not much revenue ... yet. Certainly not enough revenue to support the newsrooms that generate the content that make the sites popular. Some day it will happen. And some day, you'll probably be paying for all that content online. But not just yet ...
Posted Tue, Apr 10, 3:50 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Well, yes but ...: Chuck, ma man, 'unique visitors' isn't an additive statistic when analyzing web metrics because of overlap. You need to do some serious custom number crunching to get unduplicated uniques. Plus, think about it: There's no way the Times-PI web sites are attracting 3.5 million visitors a month. That'd be nearly every man, woman and child in the Greater Seattle area.
Posted Tue, Apr 10, 4:13 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Well, yes but ...: Well, I don't know. Maybe E&P; completely misunderstands the Nielsen numbers, becauser they clearly call them uniques.
Posted Tue, Apr 10, 5:26 p.m. inappropriate
RE: Well, yes but ...: Another thought: Someone at the Times just pointed out to me that you can't just add both sets of unique users together to get a Seattle total because a certain number of them look at both sites and would only visit one site if there were one newspaper. That's true, though who knows what that overlap is ...
Posted Tue, Apr 10, 7:32 p.m. inappropriate
Seattle dailie's web traffic: The blogs and soundoffs are great vehicles for yelling back at the reporters and editors w/o having to buy the paper or leave a voicemail.
Posted Wed, Apr 11, 5:23 p.m. inappropriate
There are fish to be wrapped, bird cages to be lined, puppies to be house-broken, and weeds to be mulched (wood chips on two or three layers of newspaper works great!). These necessary tasks cannot be accomplished electronically via a blog.
Remember...there's still a buggy whip market, albeit a small one.
The Piper