Top 10 Newspaper Websites

Hmmm. Well I'm really not too sure what to think about The Bivings Report Top 10 Newspaper Websites.


This is a follow-up to their recent research apparently but it's quite extraordinary that the New York Times come out top. They say:

We love the general feeling of the NYT site, which is pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate. The site is loaded with great features, and the website is rumored to be dropping its annoying pay wall, TimesSelect, in the coming months.

Hmm. Well the fact it has a pay wall should be enough for it to drop off the bottom of the list in my humble opinion; I can't tell you how many times a registration wall (or even a login requirement) has proved too much trouble for me to go any further.

Still, it just goes to show how powerful a brand can be. Reminds me of the weird success of MySpace which is - in so many, many ways - a pretty crap site.

More interesting is USA Today of which it says:

Social networking. Social networking. Social networking. Did I mention that this site has the most robust social networking features out of any of the newspaper websites we researched? Oh yeah. And this site has social networking.

And yes, it does have, comments, user-recommendation, digg etc this and so on. Great stuff if you've got a big enough audience but our focus in this area has shown it's difficult to get people to use it. Probably that old British reserve thing.