NYTimes Winning The Online Newspaper Battle?

By Big Tent Democrat, Section Media
Posted on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 08:50:43 AM EST
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With all the talk about the death of newspapers, this bit of data, buried in this Howie Kurtz piece on how awful Politico is, surprised me:

Politico's online readership nearly doubled during the campaign, from 2.4 million unique visitors in January 2008 to 4.6 million in October. Last month, according to Nielsen Net Ratings, it dipped to just over 3 million. By comparison, nytimes.com has bounced back almost to its October level of more than 20 million, while washingtonpost.com declined during that period from 12.4 million to 9.4 million.

(Emphasis supplied.) nytimes.com is doing October 2008 numbers? That's pretty impressive. I wonder what is behind it. The prominence of business stories? Wouldn't that drive traffic to the WSJ? Or has Murdoch's ownership really damaged the WSJ brand? I can't judge by my reading habits because I scour the Times every day, several times a day every day.

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NYTimes Winning The Online Newspaper Battle? | 26 comments (26 topical)

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Do you think? (none / 0) (#1)
by jbindc on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:25:51 AM EST

That other websites that cover mostly political news also saw a spike last fall and have since returned to "normal" numbers? People can go to nytimes.com to get more than political news.

Have the rates gone up for delivery of the NYT? Maybe that's why more people are turning to online reading?

They had a huge bump during the campaign (none / 0) (#3)
by Big Tent Democrat on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:35:31 AM EST

and went down significantly afterwords. This site included.

what is striking is the Times is HOLDING its October level of audience.


And (5.00 / 2) (#5)
by jbindc on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:40:29 AM EST

And, people who only care about politics for the horserace don't need to read political sites. Plus, many commenters here were banned and others who weren't banned, but saw many good commenters banned, left this site.


Well (none / 0) (#7)
by Big Tent Democrat on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 09:42:06 AM EST

That's a different issue. The fact is as one would expect, after the campaign, traffic went down uniformly across the spectrum, except it seems, at the NYTimes online.


I suspect it's driven (none / 0) (#21)
by oldpro on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 01:34:51 PM EST

by the many bloggers like yourself who routinely read/follow NYT articles and columnists and post with links which your readers followup.

The economy and Krugman have engendered much of that activity, I'll bet.


: Funny thing..... (5.00 / 1) (#24)
by NYShooter on Mon Apr 13, 2009 at 05:00:06 PM EST

I was surfing the Times the other day, and the thought struck me what a treasure the NYT really is. I remember, years ago, the editors/publishers were so sure of their accuracy, and proof-reading, they offered some kind of prize to anyone who could find a grammatical, spelling, or factual error in their pages.