Newspaper web sites in the US attracted 68.3 million unique visitors in the third quarter of 2008, which equates to an impressive 41.4% of all US internet users.
This is obviously due in part to interest surrounding the presidential election and this summer's Olympic Games. The figures tally with experiences on this side of the pond, where impressive rises in traffic have also been achieved by UK newspaper web sites. Last week's ABCe figures showed The Guardian's unique user figure was up 4.7% in September, to 24.2 million, while the MailOnline was up 2.6%, to 17.9 million unique users. The Telegraph was up 4% at 22.9 million.
All good news then... But the problem in the States is that online revenues are not increasing in line with the extra web traffic. Online revenue actually declined 2.4% in the second quarter of 2008, the first time it has done so since figures started to be tracked separately from print revenue in 2003.
UK newspaper publishers are also struggling with this conundrum. When I profiled Independent managing director Simon Kelner the other week, he was sticking by his long-held line that he hadn't yet worked out how to monetise his web traffic successfully, and that other newspapers could get burned in due course because of the large amounts of money they have thrown at their online presences.
Kelner will have been pleased to see that The Independent posted a rise of over 20% in unique users accessing its web site in September, its strongest performance so far. But, by his own admission, it's still far too early for him to place his trust in the Indie's online revenue potential to turn around the newspaper's ailing fortunes.
