The number of visitors to the ten most popular newspaper websites in the US showed a year-over-year increase of 16%, while the total number of visits increased by 27%, online measurement company Nielsen Online announced.
"Despite today's problems in the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper websites more and more," Chuck Schilling, the company's director of research, told AFP.
"Today's challenge for newspaper publishers is to learn how to capitalize on this online readership and translate their growing engagement into revenue"he said.
Nielsen data shows that visitors to the ten most popular online newspapers in the US reached 40.1 million in December, an increase of 16% compared to the corresponding period in 2007.
Despite the significant financial problems they face due to the crisis, the New York Times remains the most popular newspaper on the Internet. The readership of the electronic edition increased by 6% on an annual basis and reached 18.2 million users in December.
In second place is USA Today with an increase of 15% to 11.4 million unique users. The Washington Post is third with an increase of 12% and 9.5 million unique users, the Los Angeles Times is fourth with an increase of 73% and 8.0 million users last December.
Of the ten most popular, the only newspaper to see its online visitors decline is the Boston Globe (down 6% to 4.1 million unique users).
Still, Nielsen data shows that users are reading the electronic editions of newspapers more and more regularly. The average frequency of visits rose to 6.3 times per month in December, compared to 5.8 visits per month in December 2007.
The average time users spend on each visit increased marginally (2%) to half an hour.
However, despite the increase in traffic, newspaper websites still lag significantly behind the large web portals in terms of number of users:
According to Nielsen, Google remained the most popular online destination in December with 133.8 million unique visitors from the US. They are followed by Microsoft with 126 million and Yahoo with 118 million.