yelvington.com

According to E&P, Bank of America analyst Joe Arns says the value of an online reader to a newspaper company is on the rise:

Based on the total ad revenue per reader, in Q2 Bank of America estimates that on average, newspaper publishers generated about $25 to $38 of ad revenue per daily online reader compared with $70 for each print daily reader. This suggests that online readers are worth about 36% to 55% of the value of print readers, up from 28% to 42% in Q2 2006.

I'd like to see the full "show your work" calculations. I continue to believe that the readership claims of newspaper websites are inflated by irrelevant, drive-by traffic that bloats the unique-user count and depresses derivatives such as revenue per user.

It's been a couple of years since I did any heavy-duty behavioral analysis on a newspaper website, but I don't think the numbers have changed all that much. What I found then was an easily identifiable, but small, group of habituated users and very large population of one-hit drive-by visitors.

If you ignore the drive-by traffic and divide revenue by habituated users, you get a pretty powerful story about the potential of local Internet advertising revenue ... and you can see that our challenge is to build that habituated readership.

As I've said before:

... the problems are much more driven by a weakening ability to deliver an audience in any medium than by any inherent weakness of an online advertising model. At the end of the day it comes down to a simple question: Are your content and services relevant to consumers in your market?