Only three per cent of newspaper reading occurs online.
Your jaw has dropped or you are in disbelief.
But the finding comes from data on newspaper Web site and print readership, and on the surface it adds up. (I'll await a statistician to challenge the mathematician who worked it out.)
John Duncan concludes at his Inksniffer blog that online metrics for newspaper readership have been greatly exaggerated.
It goes like this: Newspaper print readership is about 87.1 billion pages a month (readers times an average of 24 pages read). Online newspaper readership is about 3.2 billion a month (page views).
And time spent is also significantly tilted to the print product. Interestingly, even though it appears the advertising rate online is lower, the amount per view (given there are several ads on a page) is relatively higher than that of a print product, it seems.
In assessing the study at the Nieman Journalism Lab, Martin Langeveld concludes that neither the online nor the print models are sustainable. A hybrid is needed to make journalism economically viable.
In my assessment, I think the 24 pages would be high, as would the assumption that every article is perused. But, even in cutting in half the pages, and cutting in half the articles, the dominant position easily remains.
