The Newspaper Association of America has just released a report boasting that online news sites are growing at twice the rate of the normal web. They’ve include some other provocative stats to show that online newspaper visitors are richer, buy more, return more often, are more web-savvy and smell better too (okay, maybe I made the last one up):
- 12% of all visitors to a newspaper web site make over $150,000, compared with 9.3% of the overall internet audience.
- 88.1% of newspaper website visitors have made an online purchase in the last six months, compared with 78.9% of the overall Internet audience.
- 73% of newspaper website visitors go online every day, vs. only 57.8% of the internet population as a whole.
- 42% of people who have visited newspaper websites have viewed streaming video on their computers in the last 30 days, compared with 27.4% of the overall internet audience.
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to read blogs (28.4% vs 16.7%)
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to be politically involved (23.3% vs. 10.8%)
- Online newspaper readers are more likely to seek out or post a product review (28.9% vs. 16.1% in the past month)
Shockingly, the online media has been quick to call out the NAA for reporting “strategically irrelevant” numbers and “fishing for something to spin as good news.” Susan Mernit notes that breaking web growth out by other categories completely outstrips the NAA’s numbers:
” Nielsen also reported this year that the online dating space grew about 16%–far more than the newspaper category’s 5.3. And Facebook grew, what–300%? So ratio of growth is relative–comparing you category to ALL of the web has only relative merit.”
Rather than comparing itself to the overall web, perhaps the NAA should’ve just said that newspaper websites are doing better than they did before? Ignoring, of course, that classifieds sales are dropping and that old-industry folk continue to preach the imminent demise of Journalism (sub. required, naturally! Or read a larger exerpt here).
If nothing else, everyone seems to agree on one thing: “The newspaper model is broken” because it doesn’t directly translate to the web. The news media scoffed at Rupert Murdoch’s bid to buy Dow Jones (and the Wall Street Journal), but maybe it’s not so far off – if newspapers can’t find a way to turn their content into profit, then maybe an organization like News Corp (or Google?) that can turn anything into an ad-supported business really is going to “save journalism”.
