Print Media Deathwatch: The Newspaper Association of America has released its latest numbers on Web traffic to newspaper sites, and while the numbers sound impressive, they reveal a fundamental challenge facing the industry – getting your attention.

Highlights of the NAA’s stats:

• The total U.S. unique Internet audience: 195,974,309.
• Of these, 70,340,277 or 35.89 percent visited a newspaper Web site.
• The average person visited 2,569 Web pages. That adds up to 503,457,999,821 page views.
• Of those 503 billion page views, less than 1 percent  (3.5 billion) of people’s page views went to newspaper Web sites.
• Nielsen says the average page view (in that universe of 503 billion) lasted 57 seconds.*  That translates to 40 hours, 40 minutes and 33 seconds per person per month.
• Off people’s time spent online, less than 1 percent was spent at newspaper Web sites (45,022,485 hours.)

For perspective, you can compare the NAA’s 70 million visitors per month, for all newspaper sites combined, with top media properties:

• Google (147,778,000)
• Yahoo! (133,139,000)
• MSN/WindowsLive/Bing (111,352,000)
• Microsoft (96,071,000, AOL (92,705,000)
• YouTube (87,686,000)
• Facebook (87,254,000)
• Fox Interactive (72,724,000).
• All NAA newspaper sites combined (70,340,277)

Note that social media site YouTube gets more attention than all newspapers sites combined.

It’s clear from numbers like these that the biggest challenge to newspapers online is just getting people’s attention. If newspapers move forward with plans to start charging to read news online, this challenge is likely to turn into a pipe dream.

via Niemanlab