From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and [...]

“I’m not saying Google’s an enemy, all right?” the chief executive of The Associated Press, Tom Curley, was telling a few people in Hong Kong on Tuesday. “I’m saying they were brilliant, and we didn’t, collectively, license as aggressively as we could have. So now there’s this moment, and the two of them are competing.” [...]

Josh Marshall, the founder and editor of Talking Points Memo, just spoke by webcam to a conference at Kent State University, and it was a revealing discussion. He said that TPM’s readership is now at 1.8 million unique visitors per month, which is up from the 1.5 million he told me in July. “We’ve had [...]

An invite-only conference began today at the American Press Institute with a singular directive: “generating revenue from online content.” At the morning session, which just wrapped up, Greg Harmon of Belden Interactive and Greg Swanson of ITZ Publishing presented their survey of 2,400 U.S. newspaper executives. The cardinal finding, first reported this morning by Alan [...]

Surprise.
All generally accepted truths notwithstanding, more than 96 percent of newspaper reading is still done in the print editions, and the online share of the newspaper audience attention is only a bit more than 3 percent. That’s my conclusion after I got out my spreadsheets and calculator out again to check the math behind the [...]

Yesterday we named the top 15 newspaper sites of 2008 (judging by average monthly unique visitors) and took a closer look at the five national papers that lead the list. In the next tier are six regional newspaper sites that showed impressive growth last year.

Andy Baio points us to the last page of this Washington Post article on Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan. 4chan is an online forum where many of the Internet’s memes — things like rickrolling and lolcats — are born, and it’s a hugely popular destination online for a certain sort of mostly young, mostly [...]

This morning we revealed the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008 as ranked by average monthly unique visitors. Now let’s take a closer look first at the top five national newspapers. (Note that the y-axis in the chart above starts at 3,000,000 uniques to get a sense of the finer fluctuations among these sites; think [...]

The data is in, and we’re ready to declare the top 15 newspaper websites of 2008! It was a hard-fought battle in a year that saw visitors to all newspaper sites rise by 12.1 percent from the year prior. We’ve ranked the top 15 by average monthly unique visitors, according to Nielsen Online, which is [...]

Tuesday was a big day for pageviews on The New York Times website, of course. But get this: Wednesday was even bigger.
Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor for digital journalism at the Times, offered that intriguing tidbit in a memo to staff this morning. He wrote:
Based on past experience, we expected less traffic the day after [...]

Consensus: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is unlikely to find a buyer within 60 days — make that 57 days — the deadline set on Friday by its publisher, the Hearst Corporation. That means the most populous city in the Northwest will be left with just one daily newspaper, The Seattle Times, which is itself in poor [...]

— If you’re not following our Twitter feed, The New York Times announced yesterday it had 1.04 billion pageviews in October. Which is a lot. But maybe not enough: Analyst Lauren Rich Fine thinks they need 1.3 billion to build a profitable online-only business model. (And, it should be noted, that’s 1.3 billion in an [...]

The Gawker Media blogs redesigned yesterday, prompting explanatory posts all around the family of sites. From a cynical point of view, the redesign of each site’s front page to include shorter excerpts of each post seems clearly aimed at generating more pageviews (and thus, more ad impressions). In most cases, the key link the post [...]

Two top sites for political junkies, FiveThirtyEight and Talking Points Memo, have announced their October stats, and they’re astounding. To put them in context, I’m inserting them into E&P’s list of top newspaper sites’ unique-visitor totals for September. (October numbers for the newspapers won’t be out for a couple weeks.)
New York Times: 20.07 million unique [...]