WordblogJournalism in a changing world

Frank Barnako at Dow Jones Market Watch has published an interesting table of the number of visitors to blogs at the top US newspapers in December. It shows USA Today at the head of the list with 1.239m visitors. Second is the New York Times with 1.173m visitors. The blogs now account to 13% of site visits.

I have looked for comparative figures for UK sites but have not been able to find any. However, page hits suggest that The Guardian could be well up in that league, if not ahead.

Earlier this month Neil McIntosh, head of editorial development at Guardian Unlimited, wrote: “To lift the lid on stats we normally keep pretty quiet: blog traffic of 1.2m page impressions in December 05 grew to a record 7.1m pages in July 06 as the World Cup and troubles in the Middle East sparked lively discussion across our sites.”

The BBC, even allowing for any differences in statistical methods, is well ahead of any US newspaper. Robin Hamman, the broadcaster’s senior community producer for the English regions, has revealed that the BBC’s blogs had over 2.06m unique users in October. Page hits were 5.7m in the same period.

McIntosh’s lastest figure being for visits a spike month, it is difficult to draw any conclusions. But it looks as if the Guardian could be ahead of any US newspaper if the relationship of hits to visitors is similar to that at the BBC. I hope he will come up with some more details.

Comparative figures from other British newspapers including the Telegraph, Times, Mail and Sun would be good to have too.