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Earnings season: Newspapers finish 14th straight revenue-losing quarter; some intel from Wall Street filings

When revenue is still seriously down, but profits are up, is that good news? The U.S newspaper companies that have reported fourth quarter 2009 results so far would have you believe it is. But based on their reports, it’s clear the industry as a whole is still in deep trouble, with no strong indication that better days are ahead.

Five of the ten publicly-owned U.S. newspaper companies have reported their fourth-quarter 2009 results; five more to go. (Those reporting so far are Gannett, New York Times Co., Media General, Lee Enterprises and McClatchy. We also have results from News Corp., but News publishes newspapers on four continents, and much of its revenue comes from films, television, cable, and book publishing. Its U.S. newspapers represent perhaps 10 percent of News Corp.’s total revenue and are not broken out for comparison.)

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5 months, 2 weeks ago 3 comments

NAA/Nielsen stats show newspapers own less than 1 percent of U.S. online audience page views, time spent

The NAA has issued another of its regular updates on the state of the U.S. daily newspaper Web audience. As usual, the numbers, sourced from Nielsen Online, sound impressive:

Newspaper Web sites attracted more than 70.3 million unique visitors in June (35.9 percent of all Internet users), according to a custom analysis provided by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. Newspaper Web site visitors generated 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites over more than 597 million total sessions.

NAA mentions that Nielsen has changed its methodology (in part by increasing the sample size of its online usage survey to more than 230,000 panelists), so the numbers should not be compared with those issued in prior months. But just in case you do compare, they are nicely up in the unique visitor and pageview categories — so far so good.

Comparison with past performance is one way to put the numbers in context, but another that seems appropriate is to compare them with the total online audience. In other words, just how much of time spent online, and page views, are going to newspaper Web sites? And how do newspaper numbers compare with top Web brands? The answers are, unfortunately, rather dismal.

A few weeks back Nielsen issued some information, also based on its new methods, painting a picture of the total online audience in June. Combining those number with the ones put forward by NAA, here’s the whole picture in context (all figures for the month of June, all from Nielsen Online):

The total “Active Digital Media Universe” (Nielsen’s term for total U.S. unique visitors online during the month, both at home and at work): 195,974,309.
Of these, 70,340,277 or 35.89 percent visited a newspaper Web site. (On the other hand, 64 percent got their news elsewhere.)
The average member of the Active Digital Media Universe visited 2,569 Web pages. That adds up to 503,457,999,821 page views.
Of those 503 billion page views, 3,468,549,698 (3.5 billion) went to newspaper Web sites. That’s less than 1 percent of all page views, or 0.69 percent to be exact.
Nielsen says the average page view (in that universe of 503 billion) lasted 57 seconds.* That translates to 7,971,418,330 hours spent online or 40 hours, 40 minutes and 33 seconds per person.
Of those 7.9 billion hours spent online, time spent at newspaper Web sites was 45,022,485 hours. That’s less than 1 percent of all time spent online, or 0.56 percent.

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11 months, 4 weeks ago 50 comments

Online newspaper audience growth: Good news? Not really.

By Martin Langeveld

newscat

The Newspaper Association of America trumpeted the release of first-quarter online audience data last week with this headline: “Newspaper Web Site Audience Increases More Than Ten Percent In First Quarter To 73.3 Million Visitors,” followed by the glowing subhead: “Newspaper Web Sites Set Records for Audience, Page Views and Active Reach; Latest Scarborough Research: Newspapers Attract Key Demographics in Print and Online.”

Pardon me, then, for reading and questioning the details and putting the data in context, something the NAA doesn’t do.

NAA reports:

First quarter traffic to newspaper Web sites was reported as 73.3 million unique visitors (average per month) by Nielsen*.
That’s 43.6 percent of all U. S. internet users, and up 10.5 percent versus the same time last year.
Page views grew from 3.1 billion per month in last year’s first quarter, to 3.5 billion in 2009.
NAA CEO John Sturm suggests this points to “digital success.”

Context:

Each of the top three news destination on the Web (MSNBC, CNN and Yahoo!News) individually each drew more than half the unique visitors of the entire newspaper industry in March. Year-over-year, MSNBC grew 9 percent, CNN 4 percent, and Yahoo!News 16 percent.
Yahoo!News alone gained 5.2 million uniques in March, or nearly 70 percent of the gain of the entire newspaper industry.
Newspaper page views at 3.5 billion per month are less than one percent of total U.S. page views (386 billion in February).
Time spent on newspaper sites in February, 43 minutes, 9 seconds per month per NAA/Nielsen, compares with total time online of 61 hours, 11 minutes and 56 seconds per U.S. person. This means newspaper sites get the attention of the U.S. online audience just 1.2 percent of the time.
The total U.S. online audience (what Nielsen calls the “active digital media universe”) in February was 167 million individuals. As NAA does note, 43.6 percent of that audience visited a newspaper web site, but given that newspaper site traffic works out to only about 1.6 page views per reader per day, many of the newspaper site uniques are clearly represent one-time-only traffic.