Print Newspapers Still Dominate Readers' Attention

[Commentary] If you take the average time spent per user per month for a site and multiply that by the number of unique visitors, you come up with a rough estimate of how much total time is spent on a site in a month— a number that seems pretty important if you want to sell attention. The New York Times, for instance, had 17.4 million visitors to its Web site in June and the average visitor spent 14 minutes and 29 seconds on the site that month. That means that readers collectively spent about 4.2 million hours on the Times site in June. So how does that compare to time spent reading the paper? The New York Times has 1.1 million subscribers who the company says spend more than thirty minutes a day with the paper. That's 16.5 million hours per month, nearly four times the total time spent on New York Times Online.