Nielsen: Newspapers getting more Web visits

NEW YORK -- Leading U.S. newspaper websites are getting more visitors, and those visitors are coming more often, in what might be a small bright spot for an industry struggling with declining revenue.

However, those visitors aren't spending much time on the sites. They averaged slightly more than a half-hour at the top 10 sites during December.

The latest figures from Nielsen Online underscore the struggles newspapers still face with how to translate their audiences into revenue. So far, online ads aren't generating enough money to offset losses from print, where ad sales have worsened because of the recession.

"Unless you can grab a greater share of people's attention, you cannot hope to sell that much advertising to them," says Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell.

According to Nielsen, 40 million people in the United States visited at least one of the top 10 newspaper sites in December, a 16% increase over 2007. The New York Times remains the top newspaper site, with 18 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 6%. USA TODAY and The Washington Post follow.

Nielsen said visitors were returning more often. Each visitor came, on average, 6.3 times in December, compared with 5.8 times a year earlier.

"People who have become news consumers have become much more aggressive news consumers," says Jon Gibs, vice president for media analytics at Nielsen Online.

But while heavy news consumers are spending more time at the websites, those sites also get a lot more casual visitors. That makes the average visit relatively brief. The average time spent at the top 10 newspaper sites in December — 32 1/2 minutes — rose just 2% from the same month in 2007.

And that 2% increase lags the 9% hike in time spent at all leading news sites, which include broadcasters' sites and news sections at portals like Yahoo and Time Warner's AOL. In unique visitors, MSNBC, Yahoo, CNN and AOL all were ahead of The New York Times.

In a ray of hope for the industry, Gibs said, newspapers are extending their reach to people who might not have bought the printed edition, such as people discovering a site when friends pass along a link to a specific article.