Newspaper websites posted their largest traffic gains last year, hitting 62.8 million average monthly uniques in Q4—up 6 percent over the same period last year, according to a report by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. This is the highest number since the NAA began tracking online use in January 2004. Among the report’s other findings:

-- About 39 percent of all internet users visited newspapers’ sites during Q4.
-- Time spent on these sites averaged 44 minutes a month.
-- Users generated more than three billion page impressions on average, a 7.3 percent increase over Q406.

It could be due to the law of large numbers - not to mention that reading a newspaper site increasingly is becoming the norm—but growth rates appear to be slowing given that Q406 was up 9 percent over the same period in 2005. Release

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