About 66.4 million people visited U.S. newspaper Web sites in the second quarter of this year, a 12.2 percent increase compared to the same period last year, according to a Nielsen Online custom analysis for the Newspaper Association of America.

This means 40.2 percent of all U.S. Internet users accessed a newspaper Web site, with just over three billion page views per month during the quarter, compared to 2.7 billion in the same quarter last year.

“The latest audience figures provide further evidence that newspapers' digital properties deliver highly-accurate and hyper-local content that consumers can't find anywhere else,” NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm stated in a press release.

The average number of unique users accessing newspaper Web sites for April, May and June 2008 was 66,388,739, with each unique spending an average of 40 minutes and 29 seconds. Each person accessed an average of 45.36 pages during those months, and visited a newspaper Web site an average of 8.08 times, according to the Nielsen Online analysis, the NAA reported.

In 2007, the average unique audience was 59,185,699, reaching 37.3 percent of all Internet users.

“That's good news in the sense that it presents an ever-more convincing case to advertisers that they should be working with their friendly neighbourhood newspapers, ie, giving them lots of money and helping them survive,” commented Reuters Mediafile blogger Robert MacMillan. “On the other hand, those online readers used to help those papers a lot more when they bought them in print… But that's another story.”