leviramsey said at January 9th, 2008 at 8:31am

It’s perhaps also spooky to note that if you divide the minutes by the sales, you also get a progression (ordered descending by sales):

The Sun: 16.97 minutes/sale
Daily Mail: 20.84
Telegraph: 36.41
The Times: 47.81
The Grauniad: 83.10

A few possible conclusions jump out:

* The Sun does the best job of using the website to drive sales. Indeed, from my occasional perusings of website of the highest circulation English language newspaper in the world, I could see how that would be the case: I don’t recall them putting much beyond the main stories and Page 3 up, with relatively little interaction. Then again, this was pre-Web 2.0 and all that.

* Guardian readers are more likely to be online and thus prefer their news that way.

* From the USA, it seems that the traditionally-broadsheet ordering is roughly correlated with the levels of US readership (and, in inimitably American fashion I shall conflate the entire world with this country; why stop with a continent, after all?) of the respective websites. Even I, whose politics would lie somewhere between LibDem and Tory, probably use the Guardian’s site (though more for the sport) than the Times’ and the Times’ more than the Telegraph’s. So it may be that foreign readership accounts for the Guardian’s off-the-charts ratio.