Blogs Turn Out To Be Good Wheeze For Papers

Turns out that blogs in papers are actually popular. Toe in the water attempts by papers like the New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post have been quite fruitful, Nielsen//NetRatings suggests. They say that blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew 210 percent year over year in December 06. The overall unique audience growth to these online newspapers was 9 percent year over year. Unique visitors to blog pages accounted for 13 percent of their December 2006 Web traffic, up 9 percentage points from 4 percent in December 2005.

The Reuters blog called up Carolyn Creekmore, Nielsen//NetRatings senior director of media analytics and asked a few question. Here’s an extract:

Reuters: What’s behind the growth?

Creekmore: Part of that extensive growth is based on the fact that a year ago, to some degree, the newspapers were not up and running in this online arena … There’s certainly a degree of comfort level that has grown over past year or so (for reading blogs) … We’ve all gotten a little more comfortable in having a conversation online.

Nielsen//NetRatings Report PDF