A year ago, Matrin Langeveld provided a startling number: Only three per cent of a U.S. newspaper's content consumption was online. It is time to update the numbers, he suggests.
If the American industry believes it is pushing its readers to the online operations, it should think again. As it loses readership in print, it is not gaining online. The proportion of newspaper content read online remains in the low single digits, but the overall attrition is considerable --- considering the decline in print readership in the U.S.
He calculates a rate of about 70 billion print page views and about 3 billion onlien page views a month. Those nearly 74 billion page views are down from about 90 billion a year ago --- a decline of nearly one-fifth. It's a higher proportion of online views --- 4.5 per cent instead of 3 per cent --- but hardly encouraging because of the overall drop.
Langeveld also calculated a decline in time spent, engagement and the market share of news sites among overall Web users.
"Meanwhile at newspapers, much effort and much dialogue continues to focus on getting readers to pay for content and battling aggregators — energy that might better be spent figuring out how not to lose the sizeable remaining audience for newspaper content, not by “protecting print” but by keeping the current print readers in the fold as they, too, gradually migrate to reading news online," he writes.
If the American industry believes it is pushing its readers to the online operations, it should think again. As it loses readership in print, it is not gaining online. The proportion of newspaper content read online remains in the low single digits, but the overall attrition is considerable --- considering the decline in print readership in the U.S.
He calculates a rate of about 70 billion print page views and about 3 billion onlien page views a month. Those nearly 74 billion page views are down from about 90 billion a year ago --- a decline of nearly one-fifth. It's a higher proportion of online views --- 4.5 per cent instead of 3 per cent --- but hardly encouraging because of the overall drop.
Langeveld also calculated a decline in time spent, engagement and the market share of news sites among overall Web users.
"Meanwhile at newspapers, much effort and much dialogue continues to focus on getting readers to pay for content and battling aggregators — energy that might better be spent figuring out how not to lose the sizeable remaining audience for newspaper content, not by “protecting print” but by keeping the current print readers in the fold as they, too, gradually migrate to reading news online," he writes.
