Internet metrics firm Nielsen//Netratings has announced that web traffic to the blog pages of the top 10 online newspapers grew by 210 percent year-on-year during December.

However, the overall unique visitors for newspaper sites had grown by just 9 per cent. Unique visitors to newspaper blog pages accounted for 13 per cent of these sites' overall traffic in December 2006, as opposed to 4% in December 2005.

Senior director of media analytics Carolyn Creekmore said: "As Web 2.0 becomes a predominant online consumer model, traditional publishers are adopting interactive forums like blogs." She likened responding to a newspaper blog post to writing an "instant letter to the editor."

The most popular newspaper blogs and their December audiences are:

• USATODAY.com blogs, 1.239 million
• The New York Times' blogs, 1.173 million
• SFGate blogs, 515,000
• Washingtonpost.com blogs, 433,000
• Boston.com blogs, 388,000

Nielsen did not publish figures for the remaining five newspapers on its list.

The majority of visitors to the top online newspapers are male (60 per cent). On newspaper blog pages, this imbalance increased to show a 66 per cent male skew. However, the number of women visiting these pages has increased by 183 per cent in the last year. Creekmore suggests that men are more likely to be early adopters of new technologies and that this accounted for the imbalance. However, she stated that she expected this to change before long:

Women make up slightly more than half of the active Internet universe and we can expect them to play an increasingly significant role in blog consumption.

The results clearly raise interesting questions for newspapers' future strategy. Blogs have clearly been a success for these papers, but do the results mean that more blogs will drive even more increased traffic? Also, since these blogs are likely to be among the newest features of a newspaper's site, does their novelty perhaps explain some of the reasons for their appeal?

In addition, media commentator Jeff Jarvis points out that the definition of newspaper blogs can have slightly blurred edges. Some, such as the Guardian's technology blog, are used for news reporting - the blog format being so accessible, lightweight and cheap as a content management system that it allows reporters faster and simpler publication than mainstream systems are likely to allow.