Yet another sign of the growing important of the “new media”: The Huffington Post, now married to AOL, has a website getting more unique visitors than The New York Times:
The Huffington Post received more traffic than the website of The New York Times in May, the first time it has surpassed NYTimes.com in unique visitors, tracking firm comScore said Thursday.
ComScore said HuffingtonPost.com received 35.6 million unique visitors in May, up from 29.9 million the previous month, while NYTimes.com received 33.6 million unique visitors in May, up from 32.9 million the previous month.
The Huffington Post’s traffic has surged over the past year, according to comScore, while that of NYTimes.com has remained relatively steady. The New York Times began charging readers for full access its website in late March.
In May 2010, HuffingtonPost.com received 23.8 million visitors, comScore said, while NYTimes.com welcomed 32.5 million.
The Huffington Post was launched by Greek American author and columnist Arianna Huffington in May 2006 and sold to Internet company AOL in February for $315 million.
The Huffington Post surged past 30 million visitors for the first time in March, apparently receiving a boost from the tie-up with AOL.
Yahoo! News remained the top US news site in May with 90.3 million unique visitors, comScore said, followed by CNN with 82.3 million.
I’m a former fulltime journalist and in one of my other incarnations I travel extensively, and will travel even more from September 2011 through June 2012. I used to love to sit down to meals alone at a table, with a huge stack of newspapers. But in recent years I bring a book because the bulk of newspapers now seem to offer perfunctory content. There are some notable examples (among them USA Today, The Washington Post, the superb Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the New York Daily News) but it’s shocking how thin many local papers are. It’s hard to image a young person bothering to buy one. Many now look like warmed over versions of what we used to call “shoppers” — give away papers with a few local pieces but mostly canned material design to fill the space between ads.
The real battle seems to be on the Internet. And — most assuredly — The Huffington Post (aided by smart hires from the New York Times, Newsweek and other former bastions of print media quality) seems more content-heavy every day.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.