More newspapers are adapting to the multimedia challenge by adding video to their Websites.
That was the major finding of The Bivings Group's "American Newspapers and the Internet: Threat or Opportunity?" report. Bivings analyzed the sites of the top 100 newspapers in the United States, as determined by Audit Bureau of Circulations data.
"Major newspapers and wire services have plunged into the online video space in direct competition with TV news sites, even though the print vehicles generally do not have existing content to leverage," said eMarketer Senior Analyst Paul Verna.
Bivings found that 92% of America's top 100 papers now offer video on their sites. That number is up from 61% in 2006.
Just over one-quarter of the sites used Associated Press video streams. Thirty-nine papers offered original content, 13 featured local news outlet video, four papers used all three technologies and 10 papers used a mixture of two different types of video.
News sites were the third-leading source of online video in the US, behind YouTube and TV networks, according to a Harris Poll conducted in December 2006.
News is the leading video content online, followed by movie and TV trailers, music videos, user-generated content, and jokes and bloopers.
These content formats play to the strengths of the Internet as a distribution platform and of the PC as a viewing device as they are short form and not dependent on the picture quality that consumers expect from their TV screens.
With online video comes online ads. The Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, USA Today, Reuters and AP sites offer video content with pre-roll or display ads from such brands as Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, Swiffer.com, Hilton, Nationwide Insurance, BlackBerry, Paramount Pictures and Cirque du Soleil.
The New York Times site offers video content with virtually no ad support, other than small sponsorship tags from FedEx and eTrade, for example, alongside the site's internal search engine.