US: Decrease in time spent at top 30 newspaper websites

Posted by Liz Webber on June 23, 2009 at 4:54 PM

Seventeen of the top 30 US newspaper websites showed a decline in the average time users spent on their sites in May versus the same period last year, according to an exclusive article in Editor & Publisher. The data come from Nielson Online, which keeps track of the most widely read newspaper sites based on number of unique visitors.

On the bright side, that means nearly half of the sites posted gains year-over-year, some of them fairly significant. The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, a paper struggling to get out of bankruptcy, added 20 minutes to the time readers spend on the site - at an average of over 47 minutes per user, it's also the newspaper site that users stay on the longest. The San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com also recorded sizeable gains, jumping to 21 minutes this year compared to 12 minutes in May 2008.

Still, some of the losses are disheartening. The biggest drop came from the Seattle-Post Intelligencer, a paper that made the move to online-only in March; average time spent on the site fell by almost 50 percent, from around 15:30 in May 2008 to 7:45 this year. Such statistics do not bode well for the newspaper's chances of surviving solely on the Internet.

Another big loser: NJ.com, the site for The Star-Ledger and five other newspapers, which also claims the lowest average time for visitors (two and a half minutes). The venerable Washingtonpost.com witnessed the third largest drop, down about five minutes to 10:58. The paper has recently upped its online offerings and announced plans to better integrate its web and print operations, so hopefully those times won't continue to fall.

Certain questions arise from a close examination of the data and Editor & Publisher's analysis. The five seconds lost by Newsday or the eight second drop for the Dallas Morning News and DallasNews.com as hardly qualify as "significant." Likewise, it's unclear why Politico is designated one of the top "newspaper" sites when all the others are obviously associated with a print edition.

Regardless of Politico's status, the site should have more cause for concern with the revelation that after only a month and a half in existence AOL's competing politics site, Politics Daily, received more than double the unique visitors as Politico in May. As per the latest comScore numbers, Politico had 1.1 million uniques to Politics Daily's 2.4 million.

So what does all this mean for news sites? Are readers really abandoning half of the top 30 sites? Not necessarily. As Editor & Publisher points out, there are a number of factors that influence average time spent on any given site, such as what the big news stories are during the measured period. Likewise, a large jump in the number of unique visitors to a site would cause the average time spent browsing to decrease.

Moreover, a recent survey of adult Americans noted that nearly half consider the websites of the country's national newspapers to be an important source of news, and almost as many would say the same for regional papers. Other online sources, like blogs and social networks, rate considerably lower in terms of where adults prefer to get their news.

And the news for the top 30 sites is not all bad. Even as the Boston Globe remained mired in negotiations over its future, its website Boston.com saw modest gains. Others, like the Detroit Free Press and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, have quietly increased their average visits by about five minutes each. Sure, half of the sites are struggling to some extent, but the other half aren't doing so bad. Let's see this as a glass half full kind of moment.

Source: Editor & Publisher