Monday, August 17, 2009

Most-visited newspaper web sites for July

Via Editor & Publisher, here are the top 30 most-visited newspaper sites for July:
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NYTimes.com -- 14,277,000 -- (-27%)
washingtonpost.com -- 11,565,000 -- 29%
USATODAY.com -- 9,761,000 -- (-6%)
Daily News Online Edition -- 9,131,000 -- 112%
LA Times -- 8,938,000 -- 2%

Wall Street Journal Online -- 8,341,000 -- (-4%)
New York Post -- 6,535,000 -- 32%
Boston.com -- 5,274,000 -- 8%
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle -- 5,092,000 -- 13%
Chicago Tribune -- 4,442,000 -- 14%

Politico -- 3,401,000 -- 47%
NJ.com -- 2,926,000 -- 41%
Atlanta Journal-Constitution -- 2,747,000 -- (-31%)
The Houston Chronicle -- 2,569,000 -- (-3%)
Philly.com -- 2,500,000 -- 47%

Chicago Sun-Times -- 2,480,000 -- (-6%)
Newsday -- 2,428,000 -- (-28%)
The Sacramento Bee -- 2,426,000 -- 84%
Orlando Sentinel -- 2,089,000 -- 49%
The Seattle Times -- 2,040,000 -- 55%

Azcentral.com -- 1,999,000 -- 41%
MercuryNews.com -- 1,871,000 -- 16%
DallasNews.com - The Dallas Morning News -- 1,832,000 -- (-12%)
MiamiHerald.com -- 1,829,000 -- 36%
The Washington Times -- 1,803,000 -- 56%

tampabay.com -- 1,758,000 -- 24%
KansasCity.com -- 1,708,000 -- 59%
Baltimore Sun -- 1,697,000 -- 7%
Star Tribune -- 1,662,000 -- 8%
Detroit Free Press -- 1,648,000 -- 9%

The Sacramento Bee jumped up to #18 on the list. I don't think the Bee has ever been that high.

Getting a ton of Internet hits is an achievement. I hate to throw cold water on the papers that made this list, but before the Bee bigwigs do a victory dance they need to face the dirty little secret about newspapers on the Internet: revenue from Internet readership is a fraction of revenue from print. So as the Bee and other newspapers try to build up their web readership they are finding their Internet income doesn't make up for their losses from the print side.
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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

The tiny Anchorage paper made the list during its Palin coverage. California's budget woes was a national story and must have been the big push for SacBee in July. It only takes one major story to put a paper on the list. Unless the budget story significantly overlaps into August, I doubt SacBee will remain on the list of heavyhitters.

Anonymous said...

Ya don't go up 84 percent in one month unless something is out of whack. It won't last.

Anonymous said...

It's actually a year-to-year comparrison and the story says there's a new formula for calculating unique visitors. It's a nice move up for SacBee. State workers were all over the site during the budget crunch. I could see SacBee staying in the top 30 but not No. 18 in coming months.

Anonymous said...

Miami and KC are also there. That gives McClatchy three in the top 30.

Anonymous said...

NY Times DOWN -27% (Biased)
Washington Post UP 29% (Less Biased)

Could it be that people, tired of Times propaganda, migrated over to a less propagandized site?

Anonymous said...

It only takes one major story to put a paper on the list.





Or timing out your login after 5 minutes of inactivity. That alone gained us 20% in one month.

When we really needed a boost, we wiped the account base and made everyone sign up again adding that to our subscriber numbers, but we got caught at that.

I have a hundred tricks up my sleeve and we use 99 of them every single month.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure the advertisers are reading this or sites will report the cheating. Why buy advertising if the numbers are cooked?

Anonymous said...

The readership numbers are from Nielsen. There's nothing a newspaper can do to inflate the numbers. If traffic numbers were self-reported or based on log files, 9:56PMs point would be well taken.

Nielsen by the way has been attacked by newspapers for a long time because its audience panel under-represents business users accessing news sites during business hours.

The points being made about popular stories are valid. It can and does cause a monthly figure to become "inflated". That's why a trend is important.

The real question, in my mind, is whether local traffic is growing. After all, that's the calling card of local newspapers.

Anonymous said...

6:55: Good post.