The Shocking State of Online News

Newspaper Web sites are attracting lots of visitors, but aren’t keeping them around for long. The typical visitor to nytimes.com, which attracts more than 10 percent of the entire newspaper industry’s traffic online, spent an average of just 34 minutes and 53 seconds browsing its richly detailed offerings in October. That’s 34 minutes and 53 seconds per month, or about 68 seconds per day online. Slim as that is, it’s actually about three times longer than the average of the next nine largest newspaper sites. And it’s less than half as long as visitors spent on the Web’s leading sites, such as those run by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Everyone has the same problem [in the online news industry]: turning visitors into residents

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.

Some 80 percent of print readers say they spent 16 or more minutes per day with their newspaper

2 years ago

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“Automated news doesn’t quite work.”

Techmeme

3 years ago

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