What have I learnt today? Blogging about books, media, words, Singapore and the world today. The blog that was Blowin' in the Wind.
The internet is said to be taking its toll on newspapers, but circulation is still healthy in highly wired countries like Japan and South Korea. Tokyo seems to be the newspaper capital, boasting the two most widely circulated newspapers in the world: Yomiuri Shimbun and Asahi Shimbun.
Tokyo has, in all, four of the 10 most widely circulated newspapers in the world. Two are published from London: the News of the World and the Sun. One is German: the Bild. Two are in China. And the other one is the Times of India.
So why aren't any American newspapers on the top 10 list? It can't be because of the internet. The internet is as widely used in Britain, Japan and South Korea as in America.
Singapore has more broadband subscriptions than people, according to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).
But the top Singapore news website attracts only 2 per cent of the total broadband subscriptions on any given day.
The Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) portal asiaone.com gets about 100,000 daily unique visitors, according to Google Trends.
Facebook, on the other hand, gets about a million daily unique visitors from Singapore, according to the same source. Twitter gets more than 60,000.
Singapore (population: 4,987,000) has a total of 5,257,800 broadband subscriptions, including 1,400,300 residential subscriptions, according to IDA.
Just over 1 per cent visit the second most popular news site.
Channel NewsAsia gets about 70,000 daily unique visitors.
Singapore's leading newspaper, the Straits Times' website gets a little more than 50,000 — less than a seventh of its print circulation. The SPH newspaper has a circulation of more than 380,000. Its citizen journalism site, Stomp, gets fewer than 25,000. And just over 15,000 visit the website of Today, a freesheet jointly owned by SPH and MediaCorp, which also owns the TV news station, Channel NewsAsia.
The BBC gets more than 40,000 daily unique visitors from Singapore while CNN gets over 20,000, Yahoo News over 100,000, and the New York Times and the Times of India over 10,000 each. Google Trends didn't show 2010 data for several sites, including the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Malaysian papers and Chinese news sites.
You can create charts like this for other websites too on Google Trends. It shows the number of daily unique visitors, where they came from, what other sites they visited and what they searched for.
Just go to google.com/trends, type in the internet addresses of the websites you want to check, press enter, and see the charts appear on screen. Read here how Google collects the data.
Here are separate charts for each website so you can see the figures for the last 12 months.
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