Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Top 25 U.S. Newspapers by Website Traffic

The Top 25 U.S. Newspapers by Website Traffic

by Jeremy Porter on October 15, 2010
top 25 newspapers by website traffic Following up on my last post about how newspapers stack up online, I wanted to explore whether or not the newspapers with the largest circulation also have the most website traffic? If you look at the total unique visitors to each newspaper’s website over the past 12 months (as estimated by Compete.com), the top five U.S. newspapers remain the same – though using this measure, USA Today does climb into the top spot.
Does offline popularity translate into online popularity? It would appear so at first glance. When you remove the limitations of physical distribution, some newspapers expand their influence online. Here are the top 25 U.S. newspapers ranked by total unique monthly visitors for the past 12 months:
  1. USA Today - 239,425,560
  2. The New York Times - 217,513,400
  3. The Wall Street Journal122,397,004
  4. The Los Angeles Times - 94,889,543
  5. The Washington Post – 9,1758,837
  6. New York Daily News82,225,690
  7. The San Francisco Chronicle – 46,696,844
  8. The New York Post45,903,055
  9. The Chicago Tribune33,230,030
  10. The Star-Ledger – 31,836,326
  11. The San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times and The Oakland Tribune - 28,391,971 (combined)
  12. Chicago Sun-Times – 27,351,047
  13. Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News - 23,797,570
  14. The Houston Chronicle23,203,975
  15. The Dallas Morning News - 22,858,507
  16. Seattle Times21,878,532
  17. The Arizona Republic20,598,071
  18. The StarTribune20,537,048
  19. The Denver Post - 20,058,704
  20. The Plain Dealer18,755,471
  21. The Oregonian - 17,421,959
  22. The Detroit Free Press15,522,009
  23. The Tampa Tribune13,280,440
  24. Newsday - 11,443,807
  25. San Diego Union-Tribune10,928,313
While traffic is a good measure of of a newspaper’s reach online, it’s not necessarily a direct correlation to how much authority a newspaper has. A better measure of online authority is Google PageRank – which I’ll explore further in my next post.

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