Newspaper Web stats and how they’ve grown

Nielsen Online published the top 30 newspaper Web sites for the month of August, and they’re compared to the previous two months here. I’ve pasted them below.

It’s interesting to read the data to see which sites do best. The New York Times, which has made great strides to succeed in the online space, is in first. It dropped in the month of July, but otherwise remained fairly consistent at a little over 17 million.

Nicholas Carlson, in a blog post on The Business Insider Web site, said that it would be cheaper for the Times to send each subscriber a Kindle and have them read the news that way. The Times apparently spends more than $644 million to print and distribute the paper each year. He ends his post by saying, “What we’re trying to say is that as a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

The Times seems to agree. They’ve begun polling print subscribers to see how much they’d be willing to pay for a subscription to their online product. Five dollars per month seems to be the consensus.

I’d pay that to read the Times each month, especially considering they provide more on the Web than they do in the printed product, and especially considering I pay 15 a month for the Times Reader software.

If they charged $5 per month to their 17 million online readers, and assuming they all stayed, they’d make $85 million a month, or just over one billion dollars a year. Given the Times Company’s financial woes we should not be surprised when the Times stops printing in the next few years.

Indeed, in Feb. 2007 the publisher of the Times said, “I really don’t know whether we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care either. The Internet is a wonderful place to be, and we’re leading there.”

It should be noted that when the publisher said that in 2007 they had 1.5 million visits per month.

The numbers below are in millions of unique visitors.

• Website — August — July — June
• NYTimes.com — 17.1 — 14.2 — 17.4
• washingtonopost — 11.6 — 11.5 — 9.5
• WSJ.com — 10.8 — 8.3 — 7.4
• USAToday.com — 9.7 — 9.7 — 9.5
• LA Times — 9.2 — 8.9 — 10.2
• Daily News Online — 8.5 — 9.1 — 6.9
• Boston.com — 4.9 — 5.2 — 4.0
• New York Post — 4.8 — 6.5 — 3.8
• SFGate/San Francisco Chronicle — 4.2 — 5..0 — 4.3
• Chicago Tribune — 3.9 — 4.4 — 4.3
• Politico — 3.2 — 3.4 — 2.6
• NJ.com — 2.8 — 2.9 — 3.1
• Houston Chronicle — 2.8 — 2.5 — 2.0
• Chicago Sun-Times — 2.6 — 2.4 — 2.8
• MercuryNews.com — 2.5 — 1.8 — 2.0
• Newsday — 2.5 — 2.4 — 2.8
• MiamiHerald.com — 2.5 — 1.8 — 1.9
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution — 2.4 — 2.7 — 2.3
• DallasNews.com — The Dallas Morning News — 2.3 — 1.8 — 2.1
• Philly.com — 2.3 — 2.5 — 1.9
• Orlando Sentinel — 2.1 — 2.0 — 1.7
• Detroit Free Press — 2.0 — 1.6 — 1.8
• The Washington Times — 2.0 — 1.8 — 1.9
• tampabay.com — 1.9 — 1.7 — 1.9
• Star Tribune — 1.9 — 1.6 — 1.8
• DenverPost.com — 1.9 — NA — NA
• The News & Observer — 1.8 — NA — NA
• Azcentral.com — 1.8 — 1.9 — 1.8
• Sun-Sentinel — 1.7 — NA — 1.5
• KansasCity.com — 1.7 — 1.7 — 1.7