Craigslist still kicking newspaper butt

Even with all the dire warnings of newspapers failing and ad revenues declining there has been good news from the latest Nielsen figures. In the first quarter of this year newspaper sites have attracted more than 73.3 million monthly unique visitors on average. This is a 10.5 percent increase over the same time last year.

Additionally visitors to these sites generated more than 3.5 billion page views per month which is an increase of 12.8 percent over last year at this time. Nielsen says these are the highest numbers since the Newspaper Association of America first started keeping numbers like this.

So how does this compare to Craigslist the biggest Internet classified ad site that many say has been the biggest contributor to the decline of newspaper advertising. Well according to Mathew Ingram on Twitter Craigslist gets 5 times the entire American newspaper industry in pageviews.

If this is indeed the case then I don’t think that Craigslist has much to worry when it comes to the newspaper industry.