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Traffic to Seattle P-I's Site Falls After Newspaper Goes Online Only

by Peter Mychalcewycz on April 24, 2009 at 01:17 PM


Back in March, we wrote about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) and how it was printing its last edition and shifting completely to a digital format. It seems that the transition has been a bit rough for the paper, fueling speculation that a paper's print division actually drives its online readership.

The Nielsen Online numbers from March are in, and, according to them, the Seattle P-I is no longer one of the top 30 newspaper Web sites in the U.S. The paper fell to the number 32 position after attracting only 1.4 million unique users this March. That is a 23-percent drop over the past year and, most likely, a bit of a kick in the pants to the Seattle P-I.

We that the occasional, slight drop in online readership is to be expected, but 23-percent is a big, bad number. In fact, it may just scare off other periodicals that consider going completely digital. Either way, the Seattle Times is loving it. In March, the P-I's primary competitor posted a year-over-year growth in online readership of 70-percent, garnering a 2.2 million unique viewers that month. This is even more remarkable considering the Times trailed the P-I as recently as February. That is an instant reversal in fortunes if we've ever seen one. However this story develops, you'd better believe the rest of the industry will be watching intently. [From: Editor and Publisher]

Tags: death of print, DeathOfPrint, newspaper, newspaper industry, NewspaperIndustry, online newspapers, OnlineNewspapers, seattle post-intelligencer, SeattlePost-intelligencer, top

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