Readership at NYTimes.com rose 21% over last year to 13 million viewers monthly, while visitors to the Washington Post Web site decreased 2%. The New York Post visitors increased by 62%. See full unique audience statistics below for the top 10 newspapers.
The overall unique audience of the top newspaper blogs is 66% male and 34% female, according to a new study by Nielsen Net Ratings.
Traffic to newspaper web sites - 60% male and 40% female - grew by 9%, while traffic to newspaper blogs grew by 210%. Male traffic to blogs grew by 226% Year over Year in December, while female traffic to blogs grew by 183%.
And the gap between the sexes seems to be widening.
Nielsen said, "Males tend to be both early adopters of new technologies and avid consumers of news."
Traffic to the top ten newspaper blogs more than tripled over the last year, reaching 3.8 million in December. The implication from the data seems to be that the Internet audience is searching for meaning and analysis and a point of view, as opposed to mere breaking news. Whether newspaper blogs, with restricted access, will substantially BIGFOOT and drive out the independent - more inclusive and diverse - blogs is a question that the market will answer in time.
Are 1,000 bloggers posting more attractive than a half a dozen? Can they come up with new, uncovered and unexpressed opinions and facts not written about in the MSM?
Overall newspaper Web sites averaged 55.5 million unique visitors a month -- one in three of all interest users -- an increase of 31% over 2005 according to Nielsen. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exclusive to the Huffington Post:
NYTimes.com adds 2.3 Million Monthly Readers '05-'06 New York Times web page readership is up 2.3 million in the month of December '06 versus December '05 - a percentage increase of 21% from 27,371,000 to 29,940,000 monthly visits. The top ten newspaper web sites had an increase of 9% over the previous year. The New York Post had an increase of 62% from 1.8 million readers to 3 million readers. Newspaper Blog readership growth year to year for the top ten newspapers was 210%, from 1.2 million viewers to 3.7 million. NYTimes.com had a blog readership of 1.1 million while USATODAY had a blog readership of 1.2 million. The Washington Post blog had 433,000 monthly visitors up 26% from the year before.
Audience (000)Person (hh:mm:ss)
1. Microsoft 120,930 2:03:01 2. Google 108,232 1:02:033. Yahoo! 111,184 3:02:27 4. Time Warner 107,555 4:14:45 5. eBay 73,763 1:38:32 6. News Corp. Online70,230 1:37:55 7. InterActiveCorp 59,259 0:25:26 8. Amazon 56,881 0:31:57 9. New York Times Company 44,240 0:18:09 10. Walt Disney Internet Group 44,094 0:31:11
Example: The New York Times had 44.2 million home and work Internet users visit at least one of the NYT sites during the month of December and spent a total of 18 minutes and 9 seconds on one of their sites.
Follow the money.
For the record, and I don't know what this means in terms of power and influence, the top ten advertisers on the Web by estimated spending in December were:
AdvertiserTotal Estimated SpendingImpressions (000)
1. Experian Group Limited $90,284,000 34,649,3332. AT&T Corp. $39,857,400 10,535,9513. NexTag, Inc. $32,120,900 15,221,8344. Verizon Communications, Inc. $31,759,200 8,962,0285. Time Warner Inc. $27,288,500 6,948,1776. Vonage Holdings Corp $24,174,400 7,533,2277. Low Rate Source $17,920,600 6,792,9638. Bank of America Corporation $16,503,600 7,536,4289. Blockbuster Inc. $16,056,700 7,309,78310. eBay, Inc. $15,566,900 2,606,156
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