Newspapers may be suffering flat to declining circulation for their print product but visitors to the nation’s largest newspapers websites continues to reach new highs.

From MediaPost.com

Newspaper Web sites continue to grow in popularity, with online newspaper operations in the top 25 media markets reaching 83.7 million unique visitors in April — up 10% from March, 12% from February, and 15% from January of this year, according to comScore figures released by the Newspaper National Network.

These visitors generated a total of more than 2 billion page views in April, up 24% from 1.6 billion page views in January.

In the top 10 markets, the number of unique visitors increased 15% from 61.5 million in January to 70.8 million in April, while total page views jumped 27% from 1.1 billion to 1.4 billion. For comparison, the total U.S. Internet population, as measured by comScore, increased just 2% from 209 million to 213 million over the same period. Total page views increased 6% from 533.6 billion to 567.3 billion.

Even more telling, newspaper Web sites posted bigger percentage increases than competitors like CNN.com, which was basically flat at about 43.4 million, and Huffington Post, which decreased slightly from 22.8 million to 22.2 million (a 3% drop).

CNN’s total page views remained stable at 1.4 billion from January-April, while the Huffington Post’s increased 24.5% from 314 million to 391 million.

While there are some discrepancies due to their different measurement approaches, and the fact that comScore figures cited focus exclusively on the top markets, they basically seem to agree with separate metrics from Nielsen for the Newspaper Association of America. Those showed newspaper Web sites drawing a record-breaking 74.4 million unique visitors per month in the first quarter of 2010 — up from 72 million in the first quarter of 2009.

Sounds like great news except that online revenues at virtually all newspapers is minuscule when compared to their print product and contribute little to the bottom line and is more likely to exacerbate the financial squeeze instead of solving it.

Several papers, with the New York Times being one of the most prominent plan to establish some type of paywall on their sites in the next year but there is no guarantee that this will solve the problem of the fickle free reader and won’t chase traffic to a site that doesn’t charge undermining the papers even more.

There is no easy answer for newspapers when it comes to online strategy but there is no doubt that the future is digital.

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