A New York Times paper rack is seen in New York City. The New York Times website, NYTimes.com, was the number one online newspaper destination in December, receiving 18.2 million unique visitors, up six percent from the previous December, Nielsen Online said.

The number of visitors to the top 10 US newspaper websites grew to 40.1 million in December, an increase of 16 percent over a year ago, research firm Nielsen 0nline reported on Tuesday.

The New York Times website, NYTimes.com, was the number one online newspaper destination in December, receiving 18.2 million unique visitors, up six percent from the previous December, Nielsen Online said.

USA Today (USATODAY.com) was next with 11.4 million unique visitors, a gain of 15 percent, followed by The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com) with 9.5 million unique visitors, an increase of 12 percent, and the Los Angeles Times (LATimes.com) with 8.0 million unique visitors, a rise of 73 percent.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ.com) saw the number of unique visitors grow by 34 percent year-on-year to 7.2 million while the Daily News (dailynews.com), a New York tabloid, notched up the most impressive growth, receiving 5.9 million unique visitors in December, an increase of 99 percent from a year earlier.

Only one newspaper site, Boston.com run by The Boston Globe, received fewer visitors, Nielsen Online said. The number of unique visitors to Boston.com fell by six percent to 4.1 million in December.

Nielsen Online also said the number of total visits to the top 10 newspaper sites increased 27 percent year-on-year to 252.7 million in December.

"Nine of the top 10 newspaper Web sites experienced positive year-over-year growth," said Chuck Schilling, a research director at Nielsen Online.

"Despite the current troubles for the traditional newspaper industry, people are visiting newspaper sites more and more often to stay on top of current events," he said.

"The challenge for newspaper publishers today is to learn how to capitalize on this active online readership and translate their increasing engagement into revenue," he added.

Nielsen Online said Google sites remained the most visited on the Web in December attracting 133.8 million unique US visitors, followed by Microsoft (126 million) and Yahoo! (118 million).

Nielsen Online also released figures for average Internet usage in December.

It said the average US Web surfer logged on 59 times during the month, visited 108 different domains and viewed 2,353 pages, spending less than a minute -- 55 seconds -- on each page.

© 2009 AFP