Little-Known Index Offers Newspapers Ray of Hope

More or less for fun, I decided to compare July’s top ten online news sites in the U.S. by traffic with their parent companies’ estimated market caps. The results are revealing.

Company               Uniques (millions)         Mkt Cap (billions)

• MSNBC                            37.5                            $249.2
• Yahoo News                    35.2                                 26.6
• CNN                                  33.0                                25.4
• AOL                                   23.1                                 55.5
• NY Times                          19.5                                   1.87
• Tribune                             16.2                                   1.95
• ABC                                    13.5                                59.7
• Gannett                             13.3                                   3.97
• Fox  News                         11.5                                 35.2
• Google News                    10.8                              152.5

(Sources: Editor and Publisher, Yahoo Finance, Reuters Finance)

Now, of course this not comparing apples to apples, but it is intriguing to see how much larger audiences per dollar the three newspaper companies generate than everyone else.

The newspaper sites are attracting over 6 users per dollar in market cap, while the rest attract roughly 0.25 per dollar in market cap. By what we might call the “Weir Index,” therefore, the newspaper sites are 24 times more effective for their size.

Before anyone writes to complain, I acknowledge this index has absolutely no meaning in the real world. Except that it may indicate that the newspaper companies are currently undervalued by investors in light of their potential future online performance capabilities.

Meanwhile, AdWeek reports that consumers are more likely to take action after seeing ads on local  newspaper sites than on any other kind of local online venue. So, all is not lost for the newspaper industry. There’s a bright digital future for those companies that make the transition quickly.