• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 2, 2010

Newspaper Web sites attracted an average monthly audience of 72 million unique visitors in the fourth quarter of 2009, representing 37% of all American Internet users, according to a new custom analysis by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America.

This is an increase of about 5.5% over the fourth quarter of 2008, when newspaper Web sites attracted 68.2 million unique visitors. In the interim, Nielsen introduced a new sampling methodology, and warns that statistical comparisons may not be valid.

The Nielsen analysis also found that visitors to newspaper Web sites generated an average of about 3.2 billion page views per month in the fourth quarter -- spending an average 2.4 billion minutes per month on the sites, spread out over a monthly average of about 565 million sessions. That works out to an average 5.6 page views per session, and 45 seconds per page view.

However, the reach of newspaper Web sites slipped slightly over the course of the quarter, from 73.2 million unique visitors in October (37.2% of all users) to 70.4 million in December (36% of all users). The number of page views also fell from about 3.38 billion in October to 3.1 billion in November before rebounding to 3.2 billion in December.

While the increasing number of unique visitors is good news for newspaper Web sites, publishers are still struggling to build online ad revenues, which remain a fairly small part of their overall business.

Through the first three quarters of 2009, the NAA tallied total Internet revenues of about $1.97 billion, representing just under 10% of total revenues of $19.9 billion.