STUDY: ONLY 3% OF NEWSPAPER READING IS ONLINE

Martin Langeveld, Nieman Lab - All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That's my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the assumption that the audience for news has shifted from print to the Web in a big way.

. . . NAA reports the daily newspaper online audience as measured by Nielsen in both unique visitors and page views. For 2008, it averaged 3.2 billion online page views per month.

. . . So, U. S. daily newspapers deliver a total of 90.3 billion page impressions per month, print and online. The online share of these page is only 3.5 percent - 96.5 percent of page impressions delivered by newspapers are in print.

Another massage of the numbers, this time in terms of time spent: The NAA's Nielsen numbers say that the average unique visitor to newspaper web sites spends about 45 minutes per month. So with a unique visitor audience that averaged 67.3 million during 2008, newspaper web sites were viewed a total of 3.03 billion minutes per month.

How much time was spent with printed newspapers? NAA doesn't offer a study providing an average, nor can I find one elsewhere, but I'm going to use 25 minutes Monday-Saturday and 35 minutes on Sunday. Multiplying this out, we get 96.5 billion minutes per month spent with printed newspapers.

So in terms of attention span, newspapers hold readers a total of 99.5 billion minutes per month, of which only 3.0 percent is online. This correlates nicely with the page view split.