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Robin Goad of Hitwise published some figures for the market share of blogs and newspaper websites that have not been remarked upon.

I think that a comparison between blogs and the websites of Print media is of interest, as both are basically written forms of communication - albeit with an increasing use of multimedia.

The growth of blogs over 3 years is startling, and together this data shows the increasing use of the internet as a news source more recently.

At the weekend the Independent on Sunday published a long article examining the Audit Bureau of Circulation (Electronic) - ABCe - readership figures for national newspaper websites. Joy Lo Dico argued that newspaper websites get a good proportion of their traffic by running material considerably downmarket from that run in the papers.

In my opinion there are problems with Joy’s analysis, in that she points the finger for running “linkbait” at a number of other national newspaper websites - without mentioning that her own paper does the same.

Further, the numerical analysis draws conclusions on very small differences (of well under 1%), in defiance of evidence in the article itself showing that these numbers are very approximate indeed.

There is also evidence emerging that UK Newspapers are using questionable Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) approaches to draw traffic to their websites.

Click through for the full article.