“The number of unique visitors to newspaper Web sites was almost flat – up just 2.3 percent – between August 2006 and August 2007, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. The total number of pages viewed by this audience has plateaued, growing just 1.8 percent last year.”

News sites are getting a lot of visitors, but those visitors do not stay long. Visitors of nytimes.com stayed on the site for an average of 34 minutes and 53 seconds this month, and that is a lot longer than the other nine leading news sites.

The challenge, says Jim Brady, editor of the Washington Post, is to turn “visitors into residents.”

In a yearlong study of 160 news sites, Thomas E. Patterson of Harvard University found some interesting results: Traffic is still increasing at sites of well-known national brands (the New York Times, CNN, the Washington Post, etc.), but it is falling, sometimes sharply, at mid-size and smaller newspaper sites. Patterson concluded, "Local newspapers have been the outlets that are most at risk, and they are likely to remain so." He suggests the declines at newspaper sites may be due to increased competition from local broadcast stations.

Another problem, facing the online news industry is that ad revenue has slowed. In the first quarter of this year, the newspaper industry saw a 22 percent gain in online revenue. In the second quarter, the industry rate slipped again, to 19 percent and the numbers are expected to fall even lower in the third quarter.

Farhi concludes, “Even as advertisers move from traditional media to new media, a big question lingers: Can online ad revenue grow fast enough to replace the dollars that are now being lost by the "old" media? And what happens if they don't?”

Source: The Daily Pulp