Nielsen News & Articles

Web publishing roll-up tackles the crazy ups and downs of online advertising and the misunderstood nature of innovative technologies.

If we can trust Jakob Nielsen and his latest report studying social networking on intranets, then next year is going to be interesting.

Nielsen went straight to various companies -- from Sprint to IBM to Johnson & Johnson -- to see how they are dealing with the increasing expectation that Web 2.0 will drive Enterprise 2.0. The quick answer, they’re not.

Jakob Nielsen says that "websites are definitely easier to use now than they used to be." That's because in his recent survey of 24 websites, which analyzed users' task outcomes and compared it to data collected from the same sites five years earlier, results showed that web usability has improved.

It's been a week or two since our last round-up of all things web publishing, and it is with pride that we announce that newspapers are still alive.

Setting Records

Earlier this week, newspaper pros gathered in Las Vegas for the Newspaper Association of America's first annual mediaXchange conference. Data from Nielsen Online was presented to indicate that average monthly unique audience figures for newspaper Web sites grew by over 7.9 million in January to 74.8 million visitors -- an increase of 11.9 percent over the same period a year ago.

Recently, a Nielsen Online report revealed that newspaper websites attracted a record number of unique visitors in the third quarter of 2008 — a 15.8 percent increase over the same period a year ago.

Newspaper website visitors generated an average of just over 3.5 billion page views per month throughout the quarter, an increase of 25.2 percent over the same period a year ago (2.8 billion page views). These figures are the highest for any quarter since NAA began tracking the data in 2004.