NAA: No increase in online newspaper visitors from Q1

The number of unique visitors to U.S. newspaper websites in the second quarter of 2008 is up on the same period last year, according to an industry group, but figures are virtually unchanged from the first quarter of this year.

by Helen Leggatt

NAA%20logo.gif In Q1 08, newspaper websites in the U.S. attracted around 66.4 million unique visitors each month (40.7% of all Internet users), up from 59.2 million the previous year. That figure remains practically the same for the second quarter, according to the Newspaper Association of America’s latest analysis.

When comparing Q2 07 and Q2 08 results, there’s an increase of 12.2% in the number of users accessing newspaper websites in the U.S., but so far this year growth appears to have stalled.

Newspaper web site visitors did, however, generate an average of over three billion page views each month in Q2 08, compared with 2.7 billion during the same period last year.

“That’s good news in the sense that it presents an ever-more convincing case to advertisers that they should be working with their friendly neighborhood newspapers, ie, giving them lots of money and helping them survive,” commented Robert MacMillan on his MediaFile blog (Reuters). “On the other hand, those online readers used to help those papers a lot more when they bought them in print… But that’s another story.”