Interesting Nielsen Online Numbers

The Newspaper Association is promoting how strong digital circulation is for their members, accounting for just over 40% of the unique visitors in the first quarter. For all those horrible cost numbers we've recounted (and budget cuts), on-line has a 12.3% increase over last year. A very remarkable change. You can read more on the study here.

At the same time, there are some really interesting inside baseball. Notice that Gannett Newspapers is No. 12 -- is that an aggregate of all their papers? I see USATODAY stands at 29th by itself.

Equally relevant -- of the top 30 sites, only nine are print media traditional newspaper. Two of the top ten are text media content creators (and that's stretching it for Daily Kos, as much a political SNW). Three of the top 10 are TV networks (Fox, CNN, MSNBC). The big leaders -- Drudge, AOL News, Yahoo! News, Google News, etc. -- are only repurposing content that comes from . . . . oh yeah, those AP and traditional newspaper journalists.