Although he doesn’t use words like “blogonomics” or “thin media,” Nick Denton offers a nice distillation of their economic logic and the social forces against them: ” one weblog item has about one hundredth the editorial cost of a commissioned article. The content management software is nearly free. The message to traditional publishers is this: you don’t need 200-500 people to run your online operations; you could manage with a tenth of that. And that is the one message the online executives, intent on protecting their jobs, don’t want to learn.” Here’s more on thin media.

Daily visits to NYTimes.com hit new highs in September, with an average of 1.28 million unique users visiting the site each day, Craig Calder, New York Times Digital VP for marketing, told me yesterday.

The September tally represents a 10% jump over the previous high of 1.16 million in October 2001. (See graph below.)

The jump in daily users puts the site’s daily readership solidly beyond the newspaper’s 1.2 million weekday circulation. An average of 1.3 million unique daily users is projected for October, Calder said. Summer months are always slow, he said.

I talked to Calder because I had been looking at the site’s published traffic figures, which ran only through August. These suggested that the site had hit a ceiling around 1.1 million unique daily users. This would have correlated with the sideways drift in US Internet user figures.

Figuring I could either blog “the plateau’ or do some fact checking, I decided to contact New York Times Digital. If traditional media can interview bloggers, why not vice versa?

NYTDigital spokesperson Christine Mohan put me in touch with Calder, who delivered the numbers. Calder attributed the growth both to increased value delivered to the site’s pool of registered users and to the public’s demand for reliable information in stressful times.

Cannibalization is not an issue, says Calder. On the contrary, the site is ‘critical to newspaper’s growth in national markets and younger user groups,’ he said.

‘As a whole, the newspaper industry is challenged by fact that readers are getting older and aren’t reaching a whole generation brought up on AOL and CNN. We’ve been extremely successful in offsetting this,’ Calder said.

The paper’s typical reader is 45, while the site’s average reader is 35, said Calder. And while 85% of the website’s users come from outside the New York designated marketing area, 44% of the daily’s readers are inside the area.

Since January, NYTDigital has been examining the overlap between site users and the newspaper’s readership and found that only 8% of site users are also print subscribers.

Growth in daily usage of the site comes because NYTimes.com is wringing more visits from its pool of nearly 11 million registered users, said Calder. A year ago, NYTimes.com aspired to attain an 18% retention rate, meaning that 18% of the site’s total registered users visited the site at least once in a given month. Today, retention is 30%, Calder said.

The site generated 85,000 new home delivery starts in 2001, up from 25,000 in 2000. Through September 30 this year, the site generated another 58,000. (My calculator annualizes that to 77,000.)

I’ll type up more notes on this later.

(Note: After I posted, Christine Mohan supplied new information about print reader median age and footprint. I’ve updated the copy above.)

Newspaper columnist James Lileks describes how he felt when the paper’s Internet connection broke and he was unable to read blogs:
“I felt cut off from the world. It was as if my window had been bricked up. I needed to know what was going on out there. Keep in mind that I had this feeling in a newspaper, where I had access to every wire service on the planet.” Yep, reading the news without blog context is like listening to an old Sony portable radio versus sitting in the midst of an orchestra. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

Declared dead yesterday, Arts & Letters Daily appears to have been resurrected as Philosophy & Literature. Have A&L’s editors, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, simply hung out a new shingle?

If so, the shuffle effectively serves to move traffic from the ALdaily.com URL before the bankrupt owner’s assets are liquidated later this month. The layout and content are similar, and the big space at the bottom of the new site says “Don’t worry, readers. This space will be filled with fresh, interesting material in no time. ‘ D & T.”

Thin media passes whole through the needle’s eye.

The “WINTER 1987 volume 1 number 1” issue of the Nintendo Fun Club newsletter sold for $1025 yesterday. (Via BoingBoing.)

Gordon Borrell and Clark G. Gilbert have applied great empirical rigor in examining the way newspapers respond to the Internet. Highlights from their access-restricted report:

“In every instance of disruptive technology studied, the disruption causes a net expansion of the marketplace. So, it seems, will the Internet create net growth of local advertising expenditures.” While cable-TV advertising took 11 years to achieve a 2.5% share of total ad spending, the Internet achieved the same share in 4 years.

But, focused on winning yesterday’s battles online, newspapers turn their backs on the real growers. “Our estimate for 2002 is that the newspaper industry is missing out on $289 million in ad revenue by not offering targeted advertising and other high-growth revenue categories that are achievable on the Internet today. By 2005, those missing categories could represent as much as $880 million…”

Newspapers are wired to defend current franchises rather than greenfield, and millennial-era Internet-pioneering losses reinforced this reflex. Currently, 72% of the typical newspaper’s online revenues come from classifieds, with half this only an upsell from print.

Even in plowing old fields, newspapers often undershoot; in Pressflex‘s experience serving newspaper websites, an astonishing number of papers fail even to promote print subscriptions online, something that can work remarkably well.

Speaking to a group of investment bankers, Dennis FitzSimons, President and Chief Operating Officer of Tribune Company, said, “There is value in Internet advertising, and we’ve invested to get our share. But the reality is this: the hyper-targeted, one-to-one marketing that the Internet can provide is what we originally thought it would be; a great tool for marketers’much like direct mail or telemarketing. It’s a great add-on. But it is no substitute for the brand-building capabilities of local mass media.”

FitzSimons also said Tribune Interactive reached profitability in the second quarter (six months ahead of schedule) based on online classified revenues. Print classified advertising represents 21% of the company’s total revenue. Finally, LATimes.com registers an average of 7,000 users a day, he said.

The CSMonitor reports: “Since May, 12 police departments ‘ in locations as diverse as Ozark, Ala., and Caddo Valley, Ariz. ‘ have signed up for the offer:” placing ads on police cars.

A critic says, “We’ve already tracked the rise of ads into every area of life from urinals to golf holes. I think this will diminish respect for the whole institution of police.” (Via Adrants.)

The company’s site explains, “If your local Law Enforcement hasn’t received Government Funding for Homeland Security or if your tax base is insufficient to provide the Vehicles your Department needs, your Local Government may be a candidate for our program. We have a virtually unlimited amount of capital available for Brand New, Fully Equipped, Local Law Enforcement Vehicles. Our Sponsors will require recognition on the vehicles. The Vehicle Theme can be your choice of very creative or conservative.”

Tackling the view that an Internet-powered glut will make words worthless, Nick Denton argues “even if bandwidth and publishing systems are free, talent and marketing critical mass will always be in short supply.”

Clay Shirky writes: “Weblogs aren’t a form of micropublishing that now needs micropayments. By removing both costs and the barriers, weblogs have drained publishing of its financial value, making a coin of the realm unnecessary. One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can’t read if they don’t pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media.”

If you write something long enough, people will draw diametrically opposed lessons. Jeff Jarvis reads the same post as “very depressing to the community of bloggers.”

My view: the pie for professional writers is going to get lots bigger.