Web newspaper blog traffic triples in Dec: study – Yahoo! News
An interesting stat indicating the mainstreaming of blogs into the media stream. I wonder how many readers of newspaper blogs would identify them as blogs — or just more web content?
“The number of people reading Internet blogs on the top 10 U.S. newspaper sites more than tripled in December from a year ago and accounted for a larger percentage of overall traffic to those sites, according to data released on Wednesday.
Unique visitors to blog sites affiliated with the largest Internet newspapers rose to 3.8 million in December 2006 from 1.2 million viewers a year earlier, tracking firm Nielsen//NetRatings said.U.S. news organizations are increasingly calling on their reporters and editors to write news blogs and compete with the expanding Internet format for informal analysis and opinion.”
Or maybe, newspapers are using inferior page-tag only based web analytics tools that are counting js-executing bots. there’s been a surge in bot activity recently. 🙂
We’re just happy to see numbers that:
1. They aren’t Red
2. They’re not indicitive of coming “staff repurposing”
3. They might fuel a wave of upgrades & improvements in newspaper sites.
Even if the numbers are off by a factor of 50% (and we can pretty much stipulate they’re not *that* bad) it’s still a staggering growth in readership that comes in an industry that hasn’t seen significant growth trends in over a decade.
Let us enjoy our day. ABC stats for the Q4 2006 will be out soon enough to sober up everyone at the party. And unlike web traffic stats, those are the numbers the papers can (and do) take to the bank.