Almost 1 in 2 Europeans Visit Newspaper Sites

The Internet is supposed to be the ‘death’ of the newspapers. Who will buy one in a few years, once it gets printed it is after all, not news anymore.

Newspapers are looking to find different ways to get their business back on track and the Internet is the best place to do that. Comscore numbers show that newspapers are still popular, but then mostly online. Half of Europe’s internet population visits newspaper websites.

The numbers from Comscore show that people still trust newspapers as an’authority’. They might see news on social media first, but they still go to newspaper websites to read more about the specific topics.

Comscore says that in November 2011, 181.5 million unique people in Europe visited Newspaper sites, which is 47.8 percent of Europeans online. And the number is growing. Compared to a year earlier this is an increase of no less that 9 percent.

The newspapers which got the most traction were The Daily Mail (20.1 million unique visitors), the Guardian (15.7 million), Turkish newspapers Hürriyet and Milliyet and German newspaper Bild.

So where do they come from?

Comscore says that Google provides the most visits to the newspaper websites (12%), followed by Facebook (10%). Some newspapers seem to get a lot more out of Google seeing that the Daily Mail and the Guardian for example got almost 23% out of Google traffic.

Facebook’s importance in traffic to these sites is growing in a rapid pace. All big newspapers saw a growth over 4 to almost 10 percent in traffic coming from Facebook.

There is a web for newspapers

With Google focussing on authority a lot more and with these numbers in the pocket it is safe to conclude that the web is the answer to the future of newspapers. But maybe not in a ‘news’ way. They are getting the attention through news, but clearly people are looking for more in depth information about the news. Now they only have to figure out that business model…

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