New Media is Winning by a Landslide

The numbers are stark.

I come home, lean back, and read my iPad.  I wake up, stay in bed a while, and read my iPad.  I get my news, Olympics updates, box scores, movie reviews (Ebert is always available! – worth the cost right there), my bank account, and business insights on my iPad.

When I was younger, and our two boys were young, on vacation I would send them off to find me a newspaper.  My two grown boys will never send their children off to find them a newspaper.

So, here is Andrew Sullivan, describing his current readership at 35x (35x!) his very respectable old media audience.  (Yes, I read his site every day – usually, multiple times a day,  The reference is to Anderson Cooper , who “came out” on Sullivan’s blog.  It generated a little traffic).

Home News: Thanks, Anderson
July was the best traffic month for the Dish since September and October 2008, a quarter of the pageviews due to publishing an email sent to me by an old friend. 3.5 million individual people logged onto this page at some point, for a total of close to 11 million pageviews. 20 percent of our traffic came from Facebook and social media. Welcome to all the newbies; big thanks to the loyalty of long-time Dishheads. This never gets old for me. Every now and again as an alumn of old media, I have to pinch myself when I realize that last month, the eyeball readership of the Dish was 35 times the circulation of The New Republic when I edited it in the 1990s. We get so used to this revolution it’s sometimes useful to take a deep breath and see just how far we’ve come.

New media is winning.  By a landslide.

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(And regarding our “little blog” – we’ve now had over 480,000 page views in our relatively brief history.  Not all of them are readers, I’m sure — just “glancers.”  But still, a far cry from the numbers who received our physically mailed newsletters mailed  of years gone by).