More good news, to corroborate the ComScore blog item below:
The Nielsen Company reported overall online video usage and top online brands ranked by video streams for October 2009. Year-over-year, unique viewers, total streams, streams per viewer and time per viewer were up, led by a 26 percent growth in total streams.
Click on the image below to see charts for "Overall Online Video Usage (U.S.)" and "Top Online Brands ranked by Video Streams for October 2009."
AdvancingTheStory.com notes: "Facebook is now the third most popular place to watch video online in the world! It seems to me that this is another area of opportunity for news organizations to disseminate content to expanded audiences."
The redesigned home page will be easy to navigate and introduce new features, such as an interactive version of "Conventional Wisdom." We'll be offering a mix of our own content, aggregated content and content generated by our users. If we were to do a magazine piece on nukes in Iran, for example, we would post it along with links to the best stories we can find at other Web sites—including our direct competitors'—while encouraging our readers to ask questions and comment via Twitter.
All that is in anticipation of a major overhaul of the print publication, to be unveiled on Monday:
Nearly everything about the way the magazine looks will change. Our new design is meant to be less daunting, more entertaining and easier to navigate. It will be divided into four clear sections: short newsy items, essays and commentary, longer features and cultural coverage. It will be printed on higher-quality paper, which instantly will make it feel better in your hand.
The print publication will be deliberately going after a smaller and more demographically desirable audience (translation: advertiser-friendly affluent niches), with an eye toward jacking up the subscription price. The Website, on the other hand, will be reaching out to a bigger audience:
The site already has 6.8 million unique monthly visitors, according to Nielsen, which means more people read Newsweek stories online than in print. We'd like to increase that number significantly, while keeping users on the site longer.
Naturally we're especially keen to see how Newsweek plans to bolster its videojournalism, which so far has been sparse and unremarkable (a FOUR-part Bob Saget interview?!?!). ...
In an era when the 24/7 Web news cycle has made the newsweekly concept itself obsolete, it would seem that distinctive hard-hitting video stories -- which a mighty media organization like Newsweek has the resources to deliver -- would be one surefire way for the struggling magazine to pull ahead of the rest of the pack.
Online video engagement by Internet users is deepening, according to a new report on the online landscape released last week by The Nielsen Company.
Nielsen Online CEO John Burbank takes a look at the economic and advertising impacts of the report.
Highlights of the report:
* The number of American users frequenting online video destinations has climbed 339 percent since 2003.
* Time spent on video sites has shot up almost 2,000 percent over the same period.
* In the last year alone, unique viewers of online video grew 10 percent, the number of streams grew 41 percent, the streams per user grew 27 percent and the total minutes engaged with online video grew 71 percent.
Nielsen also reports that video viewing has been a key element in the success of President Obama's revamped WhiteHouse.gov Website.
The proliferation of video across the site, from the President’s weekly video address to video segments on the site’s blog, has helped spur this impressive growth. Unique viewers of video content increased 236 percent month-over-month, growing from 75,000 in February to 252,000 in March 2009, while total video streams increased 350 percent during the same time period.
What's fascinating is that it's not just young folks who are tuned in to online video: "Unique viewers 35 to 49 were 78 percent more likely to view video on WhiteHouse.gov than the average viewer, while people 65 and older were 48 percent more likely."
An experimental new video feature on whitehouse.gov, Open for Questions, was launched this March, allowing the President to address questions posed by citizens via online video. Reports Nielsen: "Open for Questions was one of the top subdomains visited within WhiteHouse.gov, receiving 618,000 unique visitors during the month." (By its own measure, the site itself additionally reports that 92,937 people have submitted 103,978 questions.)
The Nielsen web ratings for 2008 are in, and here are the most visited U.S. newspaper sites, as analyzed by Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. (Note that the top-rated New York Times still has about half the visitors of non-newspaper news sites such as MSNBC, Yahoo! News, and CNN, according to Editor & Publisher.)
Here's the good news. Newspapers may be dying financially, but the number of people reading them online is increasing dramatically. (Click on image at right to zoom in.)
1. The New York Times 19,503,667 average monthly uniques Increase of 33% from 2007
2. USA Today 10,845,000 average monthly uniques Increase of 12% from 2007
3. The Washington Post 10,260,167 average monthly uniques Increase of 19% from 2007
4. The Los Angeles Times 7,886,250 average monthly uniques Increase of 54% from 2007
5. The Wall Street Journal 7,169,333 average monthly uniques Increase of 60% from 2007
6. The Boston Globe 5,211,083 average monthly uniques Increase of 22% from 2007
7. New York Post 4,335,583 average monthly uniques Increase of 30% from 2007
8. Chicago Tribune 4,271,833 average monthly uniques Increase of 34% from 2007
9. New York Daily News 4,226,083 average monthly uniques Increase of 68% from 2007
10. San Francisco Chronicle 4,158,000 average monthly uniques Increase of 10% from 2007
11. Newsday 3,163,000 average monthly uniques Increase of 7% from 2007
12. Politico 3,113,000 average monthly uniques Increase of 132% from 2007
13. Chicago Sun-Times 2,884,417 average monthly uniques Increase of 26% from 2007
14. The Houston Chronicle 2,808,750 average monthly uniques Decrease of 10% from 2007
15. The Dallas Morning News 2,647,500 average monthly uniques Increase of 52% from 2007
We’re only looking at the websites of news organizations that also print a newspaper here, because they face a special challenge in transitioning from print to the web. And while it seems clear that increasing traffic alone won’t solve the business problems of newspapers, it’s all they’ve got right now. (Politico makes our list because it distributes a small-circulation print edition when Congress is in session.)
Also keep in mind that Nielsen’s web stats, like its television ratings, are frequently disputed estimates that may be more valid in relative terms such as comparing a site’s traffic to its competitors. Fortunately, that’s what we’re doing here. And finally, we’re looking at monthly unique visitors, which advertisers prefer, while ignoring time spent per visitor because that data is all over the place and difficult to compare.
The New York Times’ victory isn’t surprising, but its margin of victory is stunning. NYTimes.com garnered 8,658,667 more visitors per month than its closest newspaper competitor, USAToday.com, or a difference of 80%. In 2007, the Times led USA Today by 5,033,534 or 52%.
Also notable among the national newspaper sites were year-over-year traffic increases of 54% and 60% at The Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal, respectively. The Journal’s rise could vindicate Rupert Murdoch’s decision a year ago to keep charging for the newspaper’s website despite complaints that its paywall was hindering traffic.
Now we'd like to see some stats on videojournalism viewership. We can't help but wonder to what extent the New York Times' admirable commitment to excellent videojournalism has boosted its online ratings.
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More good news, to corroborate the ComScore blog item below:
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