Think papers’ websites are gaining? Think again.
Think papers’ websites are gaining? Think again.
In fact, major metros' online readership has seen little
to no gains
April 7, 2016
By the editors of Media Life
This article is part of a Media Life series “Reinventing
the American Newspaper.” Click here to read other stories in the series.
For a long time, people assumed the web was the future of
newspapers.
They figured readers would transition to papers’ websites
when they began abandoning their print editions. They thought audiences for
papers’ digital side would soar.
But just as newspaper advertisers don’t appear to be
replacing their print ads with digital ones, print newspaper readers aren’t
transitioning to newspapers’ websites in this digital age.
A new research paper finds that over the past eight years
the websites of 51 major metropolitan newspapers have not on average seen
appreciable readership gains, even as print readership falls.
The average reach of a newspaper website within the
paper’s market has gone from 9.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent in 2015. So in
your typical top-50 market, the leading daily’s online audience would average
just 10 percent of the market’s readership.
At the same time, print readership has fallen from 42.4
percent in 2007 to 28.5 percent in 2015
That’s a steep decline for sure, but it shows just how
much larger print readership is versus online.
“It’s totally unsurprising that print readership has been
shrinking, but it is extremely surprising that in-market online readership
hasn’t been growing,” says Hsiang Iris Chyi, Ph.D., an associate professor at
the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. She wrote the
paper with Ori Tenenboim, a doctoral student at UT.
You would expect websites to be drawing a bigger
readership now than they were nearly a decade ago, before mobile devices were
ubiquitous and when papers’ editorial efforts were still focused on print.
But perhaps even more disheartening for newspaper
publishers is the finding that more than half
of newspaper websites actually saw declines from 2011 to 2015.
The research also found some other surprising results.
“Even among the youngest age groups, print reach is much
higher than online reach,” Chyi says.
Indeed, among those ages 18-24, the youngest group of
Millennials, print readership is more than double online, at 19.9 percent
versus 7.8 percent. Every age group has a higher print than online readership.
Chyi says the research means newspapers may need to
revisit their digital strategies.
“[The results] suggest the need to rethink mainstream
assumptions about the future of newspapers,” she says.
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