Digital Sustainability: Assessing U.S. Newspapers’ Online Readership with the Multidimensional Attention Model

ABSTRACT More than 20 years into newspapers’ digital experiment, most are still struggling in search of a business model while digital revenue remains a fraction of total revenue. To examine the sustainability of digital journalism, this study assesses the top 50 U.S. newspapers’ digital readership with the Multidimensional Web Attention Model. Empirical analyses using Nielsen and Comscore data identified problems with newspapers’ online readership across multiple dimensions (reach, popularity, loyalty, depth, and stickiness). Seven-day market reach is around 13%. Popularity varies but loyalty is low across the board – an average user makes no more than three visits a month (M = 2.53). Depth and stickiness are also underwhelming, with about two pages viewed per visit (M = 2.21) and slightly more than one minute spent on a page (M = 1.18). While local papers do not benefit from the economies of scale, national newspapers, despite more resources, outperform their local counterparts only on the popularity dimension. Mobile users constitute the majority but fall short on loyalty and depth. Users aged 18–24 remain a small portion of the newspaper audience. These findings parse out the industry-wide failure to engage online readers. At the core of newspapers’ digital sustainability problem is a readership that falls short in multiple ways.