As newspaper sales continue to slowly decline, editors have had to adapt in order for their paper to survive in the age of the internet.
More and more people are turning to the web to get their daily fix of news and many newspapers have been successful in their ability to change to meet this demand.
In a report for The Guardian, Ian Mayes wrote that the audience for the newspaper’s website, Guardian Unlimited, was awe-inspiring. There were more than 100 million page impressions on the website in June alone (up from 5 million five years ago), made by nine million individuals.
Another big success has been The Sun’s news on-line site. At the last monthly count, it had 116 million page impressions, with 4.1 million users – higher than the paper’s daily sales.
Both The Guardian and The Sun’s websites have a global reach that outstrips its newspaper circulation. In the US, Guardian Unlimited is read by 4.3 million Americans, compared with the newspaper which has a daily readership of 1.1 million.
Only a third of the The Sun’s website visitors were from the United Kingdom, another third from the US and more than 100,000 visitors from Canada, Australia, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Sweden and France. The Sun’s page3.com website has a further 950,000 unique visitors a month.
The report says that each of the upmarket newspapers can also report online success. The Financial Times, FT.com has 58 million page impressions and 36 million users, while telegraph.co.uk has 30 million page impressions and 3.7 million users.
Currently, newspapers are reluctant to make a decision about whether to charge online users for fear of turning them away.
Recently The Guardian online started charging for an exact reproduction of each day’s paper in page form on the web. FT.com already has 80,000 paying subscriptions and for overseas users of the Times Online, they can receive a daily digital edition for a charge.
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