Where everybody visits newspaper sites

Newspapers own less than 1 per cent of the time spent online in the US. This is in strong contrast to the situation in Scandinavia. In fact, Norway’s largest newspaper site, VG.no,  have more page views than any newspaper site in English, despite the fact that only 4,7 million people live in the country.

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The June numbers from Nielsen and the Newspaper Association of America are indeed very low, at least if you consider that USA does have more than 300 million inhabitants, of which 195 million  are defined as web users by Nielsen.

Here are some of the numbers:

• Only one in three users – 70 million – visited a newspaper site during June. I repeat: One in three!
• Newspaper sites generated 3,5 billion page views and 597 million user sessions
• Nieman Journalism Lab points out that this amounts to 0,69 per cent of the total page views among web users in the USA. 0,56 per cent of total time spent online was spent on newspaper sites.

Now let us compare these numbers to Norway, a country of 4,7 million people (or about 1,5 % of the US population). According to TNS-Gallup there are 3,4 million monthly internet users in Norway above the age of 12. In no other country people have read as many newspapers as in Norway, and the habit of trusting the media companies has been transferred online.

Numbers can not automatically be compared: In Norway web traffic is measured in terms of daily and weekly number of visitors, while Nielsen uses monthly statistics for American sites. It is also difficult to estimate how much of total online time is spent on newspaper sites. Let us still make a try, though.

Here you find the weekly statistics for week 31:

Note that this list only includes the largest Norwegian web sites, and not numbers for international sites like Google, Facebook and YouTube.
Top of the list is vg.no, which is the web site of Norway’s largest newspaper. With 2,9 million weekly visitors, or close to 90 per cent of Norway’s monthly web users, it is no less than a dominant position.

To put it in perspective: VG.no during this week alone had twice as many page views as nytimes.com in the whole month of May, according to numbers from Comscore.

But you also find a number of other newspapers on the Norwegian top web list: Dagbladet.no (1,7 million UV), Aftenposten.no (916.000 UV), Adressa.no (313.000 UV), Bergens Tidende (306.000 UV) and DN.no (275.000 UV), as well as  a number of sites that are primarily offering news content from media companies: NRK.no (1,9 million UV), Nettavisen.no (864.000 UV), ABCnyheter (574.000 UV), E24.no (483.000 UV), Klikk.no (447.000 UV) and DinSide.no (401.000)

Times of India recently claimed to be the top English language newspaper web site in terms of page views, again citing data from Comscore.  Next on the list were the sun.co.uk (142 million), nytimes.com (124 million),dailymail.co.uk (73 million) and washingtonpost.com (61 million).

Multiply page view numbers in the list above by four to get an estimate of monthly traffic and you will see that all top three Norwegian newspapers, – VG, Dagbladet and Aftenposten – would have made it to this top five list from Comscore. That is, if they had been published in English.

Again: Let me remind you that Norway is a country of only 4,7 million people. The dominant position of the newspaper web sites thus is quite impressive.

So why are newspaper web sites so strong in Norway compared to the USA?

I will not go into a deep analysis, but just quickly point out three contributing factors:

• Less competition in small language areas like Norwegian. There will simply be fewer businesses with the power to build strong web sites with lot of original content and users will have less choice.
• Norway has enjoyed the highest newspaper circulation per capita in the world. Even as circulation now is dropping, the media companies are very important in people’s life. This habit has been transferred to the online world.
• Norwegian newspapers have been very offensive in building a strong web presesence early. Editors have deemed it important for the long-term survival of their companies  to take a leading role in presenting content on the web. This involves strong emphasis on interaction with readers. In fact, a significant part of VG.no’s success is the social network Nettby, which is extremely popular among Norwegian teenagers.

Tagged as: Aftenposten, Dagbladet, media, New York Times, news, newspapers, Norway, USA, VG, web