Newspaper Web sites have attracted a substantial online audience, but face some major obstacles to monetizing their readership with advertising, according to several new studies. However, online publishers and advertisers outside the newspaper business must also confront the same issues.

The most recent study, from TubeMogul -- an online video research and analytics outfit -- confirms what many have long suspected. Consumers dislike pre-roll video advertising to the point that it will actually deter them from viewing online video content.

Specifically, TubeMogul found that one-quarter of visitors who click on an online video link on a newspaper Web site will close or navigate away from the video window without watching the video if a pre-roll ad begins playing.

This also held true for visitors to magazine Web sites -- but the figure was much lower (11%) for visitors who clicked on online video links on broadcast Web sites. This may reflect an expectation that TV content will be accompanied by advertising.

For the Web in general, the "quit rate" for online video links preceded by video advertising averaged around 17%, according to the same research findings from TubeMogul, which observed online interactions with 1.8 million video streams over a two-day period.

Newspaper publishers also face a loss of traffic, due to consumers skimming headlines on news aggregators but not clicking through to the newspaper Web sites, according to a new report from Outsell Research analyst Ken Doctor.

Doctor found that in 2009, 19% of those surveyed chose to visit news aggregators like Google, Yahoo or MSN as their first destination for news, up from just 10% in 2006. Over the same time period, the number visiting newspaper sites as their primary destination increased from 3% to 6%, giving the news aggregators a threefold advantage in 2009.

More ominous for newspaper publishers, 44% of respondents who visited news aggregators first used Google to skim headlines, but without clicking through to read the full article on the newspaper Web sites. This presents problems not only in terms of advertising, but also any proposed system to charge for online content. Restrictive pay walls will have to reveal article titles and probably small descriptive blurbs, to market them to online readers.

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