Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

Roy Greenslade asks how often do readers return to newspaper websites and points out “a US survey of traffic on newspaper websites comes up with the following figures. Just 37% of newspaper site users are regular visitors, and only 27% visit daily.“

I think a better question is how long readers spend on newspaper websites. Every day I’ll click through to articles on the likes of the Irish Times, RTE, Silicon Republic and Electric News websites. Click through describes my activity best though. I’ll spend thirty seconds to two minutes maximum on any of the sites. The closest any of the sites comes to linking back to other articles is Electric News’ related stories at the bottom of an story.

The longer you get visitors to stay on your website, the longer you’ll expose them to ads and thus make more money in the progress. With more media organisations tentatively dipping their toes into the online world, you’d swear that they’d use a little common sense.

Consumers will spend hours trawling through online classifieds. I think it’s safe to say that they’ll spend time reading through articles as well.

Technorati Tags: Media, Piaras Kelly