Saturday, April 25, 2009

Nielsen: readers spending less time at newspaper web sites

Hard to know what to make of the latest Nielsen study. Via Editor & Publisher, a Nielsen study shows people are spending less time on newspaper web sites than they did a year ago.

Time spent at the top-ranked site, the New York Times, was 6 minutes less in March 2009 than 2008. Nielsen defines time spent as the average time spent per person at a site during the month. Over half of the top 30 sites saw a drop in time spent by readers compared to a year ago.

The list below shows the top 30 sites ranked by unique visits.

Newspaper Web site -- March '09 (hour:minute:second) -- March '08

NYTimes.com -- 0:31:12 -- 0:37:14
USATODAY.com -- 0:17:55 -- 0:11:26
washingtonpost.com -- 0:15:58 -- 0:16:14
Wall Street Journal Online -- 0:09:34 -- 0:14:49
LA Times -- 0:06:57 -- 0:07:38
Boston.com -- 0:15:23 -- 0:11:40
Daily News Online Edition -- 0:05:51 -- 0:08:36
Chicago Tribune -- 0:08:38 -- 0:07:16
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle -- 0:12:24 -- 0:10:13
New York Post -- 0:10:33 -- 0:08:49
DallasNews.com - The Dallas Morning News -- 0:04:05 -- 0:04:51
The Houston Chronicle -- 0:22:23 -- 0:28:40
Newsday -- 0:08:22 -- 0:03:52
Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- 0:20:43 -- 0:11:23
Politico -- 0:10:04 -- 0:15:11
Chicago Sun-Times -- 0:06:55 -- 0:11:04
MiamiHerald.com -- 0:02:41 -- 0:03:10
Star Tribune -- 0:32:34 -- 0:33:02
The Seattle Times -- 0:07:06 -- 0:11:34
International Herald Tribune -- 0:04:30 -- 0:02:47
NJ.com -- 0:07:38 -- 0:11:31
Orlando Sentinel -- 0:07:57 -- 0:04:19
Azcentral.com -- 0:10:25 -- 0:13:23
The Washington Times -- 0:04:32 -- 0:04:39
The News & Observer -- 0:10:00 -- 0:07:18
tampabay.com -- 0:13:44 -- 0:06:19
Cleveland.com -- 0:07:24 -- 0:10:36
MercuryNews.com -- 0:04:41 -- 0:05:06
KansasCity.com -- 0:06:06 -- 0:05:30
MLive.com -- 0:10:44 -- 0:09:22

McClatchy papers in the top 30: Miami Herald (2:41 minutes in 2009); Seattle Times (7:06 minutes in 2009); The News & Observer (10:00 minutes in 2009); Kansas City Star (6:06 minutes in 2009).

The study doesn't say, but I'm guessing less time spent at the site results in less ad revenue.

Explanations?

Hat tip: comments
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12 comments:

Anonymous said...

less time spent ~ less revenue
TRUE

less time spent b/c less content
ABSOLUTE TRUTH

Anonymous said...

Actually it's pretty much meaningless. Some have opened their articles to aggregate services such as yahoo buzz, while others have stopped open fourms on their sites while requiring registrations. Then there are others that require their staff to use the company's front page as their home page while timing it out every 5 minutes so they can get their hit count up.

Advertisers are not stupid enough to believe these phony and concocted measures. They care about one thing. Referred hits that link directly from the paper's site to their own. Everything else is a bunch of bunk and bullshit.

Anonymous said...

I know I'm spending less time at news websites due to the bias in the reporting.

Anonymous said...

I know I'm spending less time at news websites due to the bias in the reporting.

----------
Me too, but the real "time spent" killer is the "drive by" viewer like those of us who visit a link to a site we may hate because it is posted on blogs, and services like Drudge, Yahoo News etc.

We go there, read the story and feel a little dirty for having done so, but it drives down the time the average user spends on their site tremendously. It does increase hits, but advertisers caught onto that scam a long time ago. Also, almost everyone is aware that Nielsen cooks the books with completely fabricated measures, which is why Cable outlets told them to shove their service and come up with something believable before they try again.

Anonymous said...

***I know I'm spending less time at news websites due to the bias in the reporting.***

Translation: It tries to reflect reality, and thus reports things I don't like or agree with. It is only unbiased if I agree with it.

Anonymous said...

Actually it's pretty much meaningless
---------------------------------
Of course it is (wink, wink). But, the truth is the only, best and proper way to look at any and all MNI statistics, is that these clown, hacks WILL be bankrupt this year.

I know, I know, we're not bias, we don't repeat DNC talking points (ahmed), we won't default on 2 billion in bonds, there are no Marxists at MNI, and no one at MNI wants to teabag anderson (up the pooper) cooper.

Anonymous said...

I wonder what percent of website viewers are using Firefox with Adblock. You can't count a hit if the hit blocks your ads.

Anonymous said...

The longer newspapers dither about keeping their half-assed dead tree model afloat, the more readers realize how biased and useless they are. New media readers are not interested in trading one biased news form for another. You snooze, you lose, they call that. Pay for the lying NYT? Sheesh!

Anonymous said...

I wonder what percent of website viewers are using Firefox with Adblock. You can't count a hit if the hit blocks your ads.

Promoting Ad block plus is almost a religion for me. Also don't forget a good double proxy and Show IP.

JAT said...

Re, Ad Block etc...

I've been running NoScript, sometimes with custom Greasemonkey scripts loaded, for YEARS now. Bottom-line, I rarely load and see ads and web-bugs of any kind.

I don't know if the newspaper folks do not understand this or hope it goes away, deep linking.

When will they understand that the platform gives control to the end-user, not the content producer. Heck I've even seen some defenders of the status quo model cite the frickin' RIAA and the music industry as a model.

Idiots.

Oh, and OF COURSE time on site is going down. The general public is getting better and better at finding what they want and moving on. If you had an opt-in model instead of a random-eyeball model this would not matter.

Anonymous said...

Anony 5:44,

Based on that sort of logic, I guess you think the old reporter maxim, "I'm doing my job. I get complaints from both sides." shows that reporters are reporting the truth.

Anonymous said...

where did the Star-Telegram fall on the Web site list?