NAA: Newspaper Web traffic up 10%

Web traffic to newspaper sites grew more than 10 percent in the first quarter of 2009, the Newspaper Association of America said last week.
The group said newspaper Web sites attracted more than 73.3 million monthly unique visitors on average, 43.6 percent of all Internet users. The study was conducted by Nielsen Online for NAA.
The study also found that newspaper Web site visitors generated an average of more than 3.5 billion page views per month throughout the quarter, an increase of almost 13 percent. NAA said the figures were the highest for any quarter since it began tracking Web traffic data in 2004.
“Digital success has become a critical component of newspapers’ transformation, and these record audience numbers provide further proof that Americans continue to rely on the trusted newspaper brand for highly accurate news and information in print and online,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm in a statement.
NAA also released data from Scarborough Research that found that a third of Americans with post-graduate degrees had visited a newspaper Web site in the past week. Of that group, almost 90 percent either visited a Web site or read a print newspaper in the past seven days.