U.S. newspaper Web sites drawing record high traffic

Posted by Erina Lin on May 25, 2010 at 4:03 PM

U.S. newspaper sites continue to see increases Web traffic, according to the latest comScore figures released by the Newspaper National Network. Online newspaper operations in the top 25 media markets drew 83.7 million unique visitors in April 2010, up 10 percent from March, 12 percent from February, and 15 percent from January, Media Post reported.

Total page views in April reached more than two billion, compared to 1.6 billion page views in January.

The top 10 markets gained the number of unique visitors by 15 percent from 61.5 million in January to 70.8 million in April. Total page views boosted 27 percent from 1.1 billion to 1.4 billion. This outperformed the total U.S. Internet market, as Internet population, according to comScore, only increased 2 percent from 209 million to 213 million over the same period. Total page views of the whole market grew 6 percent from 533.6 billion to 567.3 billion, according to Media Week.

Moreover, newspaper sites reported bigger percentage increases than competitors including CNN.com and Huffington Post, which unique visitors stayed flat at about 43.4 million and dropped 3 percent from 22.8 million to 22.2 million, respectively.

In terms of total page views, CNN remained stable at 1.4 billion from January to April, while Huffington Post gained 24.5 percent from 314 million to 391 million.