Posts Tagged ‘national press’
Top 30 US newspaper sites for January
Via Editor & Publisher, an exclusive break-down of the top 30 US newspaper sites for January.
Top 10 below and the full list on the E&P site. Not surprising to see nytimes.com leading the pack with its outstanding year-on-year growth.
Brand or Channel — Unique Audience (000) — Year-over-year % Change
NYTimes.com — 20,461 — 45.1%
USATODAY.com — 12,314 — 19.4%
washingtonpost.com — 9,902 — 14.6%
Wall Street Journal Online — 6,962 — 81.4%
LA Times — 5,715 — 4.7%
Boston.com — 5,194 — 23.7%
SFGate.com/San Francisco Chronicle — 4,255 — (-3.9%)
New York Post — 4,027 — (-3.5%)
Newsday — 3,764 — 59.2%
Chicago Tribune — 3,185 — (-15.7%)
Murdoch to keep WSJ access fees
Via Jemima Kiss at the Guardian, Rupert Murdoch has backtracked on plans to open up the Wall Street Journal’s paid-for content. In fact, subscribers can expect to pay more for it:
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday, Murdoch said his plans for the newly-acquired publication still involved expanding the audience for general news.
But the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which concluded its takeover of Wall Street Journal owner Dow Jones last month, indicated that WSJ.com users would probably have to pay more for content that remained behind the subscription wall.
“We’re sort of dividing it up. Those things you can get more or less as a commodity on different sites about finance, that will certainly be free at the Wall Street Journal,” he added.
More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/25/digitalmedia.rupertmurdoch?gusrc=rss&feed=media
Google to buy New York Times?
Via John Ellis at RealClearMarkets, is Google about to buy The New York Times?
What’s in it for Google? Well, for one thing, it’s cheap. Sell off the New England properties and the real cost is $3 billion. That’s not much money to buy one of the premier brands of the information age. It also comes with some excellent real estate, which further reduces the risk. And happily enough, it will probably get cheaper in the coming months. So the price is definitely right.
Second, Google is embarking on an ambitious mobile platform. It is buying wireless spectrum and will soon introduce Google Mobile. In so doing, it is entering into an arena where the established players have hired (almost) every lobbyist and (almost) every law firm with expertise in telecommunications in Washington, DC and in virtually every state capital. Owning the New York Times would level that playing field in one fell swoop.
This would also fit in with John Battelle’s idea that Google is making a play for the second click.
And while it’s not in the same league as Google, let’s not forget that the NYT Company acquired About.com in March 2005, which (according to their own info) is ‘a top 10 content site‘.
And speaking of content, Google would also be buying the highly respected New York Times Syndicate and News Service, giving it tremendous reach outside of the US.
More: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/01/might_google_buy_the_new_york.html
UK print brands attract growing overseas audience
comScore reports that the UK’s national newspapers are attracting an increasing number of international readers, with visits to DailyMail.co.uk from users overseas up 153 per cent from a year ago and nearly 60 per cent of visits to BBC sites originating from outside the UK.
The Daily Mail had the highest proportion of international visitors, with 69 percent of its 7.6 million visitors originating from outside the U.K. The BBC attracted 59 percent of its audience internationally, while the Telegraph (57 percent) and the Guardian Media Group (56 percent) also drew more than half their respective audiences from outside the U.K. Only two of the ten sites studied, British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) and ITV Sites, had less than a quarter of their traffic originate internationally.
Ads coming to Guardian podcasts
Via Journalism.co.uk, the Guardian is looking to monetise its podcasts:
The Guardian is planning to launch adverts in its podcasts later this year. Speaking at a Radio Academyevent on podcasting, Matt Wells, head of audio for Guardian Unlimited, said the media group was developing software to allow the sale of ’spot ads’ in Guardian podcasts.
Some Guardian podcast stats from the report:
Last month the site recorded 1.5 million downloads across all of its podcasts, Wells said, with 15-20,000 downloads of the Media Talk podcast over a week and 80-100,000 weekly downloads of its Football Weekly show.
