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Aug 21 2008 5:20PM EDT

Magazine Web Traffic: 'Surge' or Embarrassment?

Now this is just sad. "Magazine Website Traffic Continues to Surge" brags the industry's main trade association, the Magazine Publishers of America, in a press release.

Leaving aside the question of whether something can continue to surge -- that word denoting a degree of suddenness or periodicity -- just what does this "surge" entail? Why, an 8.5 percent year-over-year increase in unique visitors for the second quarter. Gosh, that's "more than double the rate of growth for the overall U.S. Internet audience," don't you know?

Well, "surge" is one word for it. "Disaster" is another. Eight percent growth doesn't even qualify as treading water when you compare it to the growth of newspaper websites. NYTimes.com was up 38 percent in July, year over year; LATimes.com was up 66 percent, and WSJ.com was up 94 percent. And newspapers are dying, in case you haven't heard.

As I noted last week, the magazine industry isn't completely without innovation. But magazine publishers still seem way too complacent in the idea that long-terms trends in media will be kinder to them than they have been to newspapers. One day they're going to wake up and realize the brands that ruled the earth in the era of print are worthless in the digital age because no one bothered to invest in making the transition. You'd think maybe the death of magazines like this one, and this one, and this one and this one would make an impression.

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