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Just as when Martin Langveld pulled a statistical rabbit out of his hat to show that almost all "newspaper reading" happens in print, this post will be celebrated by print executives seeking comfort in their old ways.
Chittum argues that most newspaper audience consumption happens in print, not online.
Chittum calculates total time on the New York Times' site by multiplying 17.4 million visitors by the 14:29 average each visitor spent on the site (in a normal month the TOS is twice that, as he acknowledges). 17.4 million visitors times the more-normal 30 minutes on site per visit would be 8.7 million hours a month online. (Update: An earlier version calculated time based on data of time per visit. Nielsen actually counts total time per visitor for the month, as Ryan notes in the comments. Numbers have been updated.)
Chittum calculates readers spend 26.4 million with the print newspaper each month. And that calculation is far less certain. To calculate the amount of hours spent with the newspaper, Chittum adopts an internal estimate by the New York Times that every reader spends an average of 30 minutes a day. That's an unsubstantiated internal number thrown out by an executive (during a web chat, ironically). There's just no way this is true. Many subscribers don't even pick up the paper on a given day, many more only see the front page. Certainly there aren't 2.2 readers each spending an average of 30 minutes a day with every copy printed. When a newspaper pays a consultant to tell them people spend time reading their paper, the consultant tells them that. At least web analytics are real.
This numbers argument aside, Chittum's a pretty smart guy. I disagree with him on some things (pay walls, AP's DRM strategy), but he's not one of the ink-stained denialists.
He acknowledges at the end of his post that the discussion of the present numbers isn't even the most important metric. What matters is the trend -- what market is growing, which one is shrinking:
"This analysis doesn’t present any trendlines, which are moving away from print and toward online. But this is fifteen years into the age of the online newspaper—and going on a decade into the high-speed Internet era—and you can spin it a couple of ways: It points to the surprising resiliency of print, or it signals the pitiful job newspapers have done online.So whatever you choose to believe about the current balance of readership, we all know which way it's going -- online -- and that we need to get ahead of it.
"I’d say it’s some of both."
5 comments:
Thanks for the kind words.
Those time-spent-online numbers, unfortunately, are for each visitor per month, not per visit, according to E&P:
"Nielsen (owned by E&P's parent company) defines time spent as the average time spent per person at a site during the month."
Would that it were that they were time-spent-per-visit. The numbers would be much easier to make work for newspapers.
Also, as to time spent with the paper, my chart does two scenarios: one for 30 minutes a day and one for 20 minutes a day.
And remember these are averages. You may not pick up the paper on a Monday, say, but you might spend an hour or two with the Sunday paper.
I think the 20/30 minute scenarios are somewhat conservative. Many papers claim higher.
Whoops. That first comment was from me, Ryan Chittum.
Fair enough... that would make the time about 8-9 million hours on NYTimes.com in a normal month.
On the broader point of what action/strategy a newspaper exec ought to puruse based on audience data, I'd rather bet aggressively on the online future than try to reassure myself it's "not that bad" and there are "still" print readers for now.
Don't know how you read a newspaper or if you read one at all, but even my little local paper in Benton Harbor, MI, The Herald-Palladium commands more than a cursory glance that the front page.
If a customer pays for a newspaper and invites that paper into his or her home, I think it is a safe bet the she or he spends significant time with the print product. Perhaps not every day, but frequently enough to justify the expense.
People seek the news and information they want online. In print, people run into news and information they had no idea they were interested in. The media perform different functions and serve different purposes. both have value.
Jeff
can you blog on this issue one day pro or con? DANNY
Do we need a new word for the new kind of "reading" we do on screens?
by Danny Bloom
TAIPEI, TAIWAN -- Are you reading this press release -- or -- are you
screening this? How you answer
this question will determine whether you get to the bottom of this
news release.
Alex Beam, writing in the Boston Globe on June 19, fired the first
volley in this now-national
discussion. "Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we
read on the
printed page?" Beam asked rhetorically. His column was headlined by a
savvy Globe copyeditor: "I screen, you screen, we all screen."
The answer to Beam's question is, of course, yes. From most of the
research that has come in so
far from academics in
North America and Europe, the answer is clear, although not everyone's
in agreement with what it all means.
Yes, screening has multiple meanings. We screen movies, we screen job
candidates, we screen
patients for medical problems, we do a lot of "screening" in this
world of ours. And now, you will be hearing a lot about a new kind of
"screening" -- so-called reading on plastic, pixelated screens.
Dr. Anne Mangen at the
University of Stavanger in Norway tells us what she thinks about the word
"screening" for reading on a screen: "My first
impression is that the term 'screening' is adequate in some
respects, but not in others. It's adequate to the extent that it
points to certain differences in the reading mode which has to do with
the display nature, the central bias of a screen compared to a page of
print text (our gaze is naturally oriented towards the center), and
the image-like character of modalities (we tend to read a screen
spatially, in contrast to the page which we linearly)."
Dr Mangen, in a published academic paper published in Britain last
December, listed a few reasons that reading on paper
and reading on a screen are two very different animals.
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