Blogs have given the nations top 10 newspaper sites a much-needed increase in traffic. Over the past year Web traffic to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210 percent. Over all the unique audience growth has increased by 9 percent in the past year. Unique visitors to blog pages accounted for 13 percent of Web traffic in December 2006. That’s up 9 percentage points from 4 percent in December 2005.
“As Web 2.0 becomes a predominant online consumer model, traditional publishers are adopting interactive forums like blogs,” said Carolyn Creekmore, senior director of media analytics, Nielsen//NetRatings. “It makes perfect sense for online newspapers, where responding to a blog posting is like writing an instant letter to the editor.”
A portion of the growth can be attributed to online newspapers adding blogs to their sites that did not exist in 2005 according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Also with the format being relatively new readers gradually became more comfortable with blogs.
Creekmore told Reuters,” There’s certainly a degree of comfort level that has grown over past year or so (for reading blogs),” she said. “We’ve all gotten a little more comfortable in having a conversation online.”
The Nielsen//NetRatings report also said that newspaper blog readers tend to skew male. Sixty-six percent were men while 34 percent were women.
“Men tend to be both early adopters of new technologies and avid consumers of news,” said Creekmore. “That having been said, women make up slightly more than half of the active Internet universe and we can expect them to play an increasingly significant role in blog consumption”
Here are Nielsen’s top 10 online newspapers ranked by the amount of traffic they receive.
1. NYTimes.com
2. USAToday.com
3. Washingtonpost.com
4. LATimes.com
5. SFGate.com (San Francisco Chronicle)
6. Boston.com (Boston Globe)
7. Chicagotribune.com
8. NYPost.com
9. WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal)
10. NYDailynews.com (New York Daily News)
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Mike is a staff writer for murdok. Visit murdok for the latest ebusiness news.
