Traffic's up, page views are up, but where's the revenue for newspaper sites?

Figures provided by the Newspaper Association of America indicate that there has been a 75% increase in unique audience U.S. newspapers' online sites. Which, says a story from MediaDailyNews, raises the question about whether or how newspapers could capitalize on this "spectacular growth".

The story reports that active reach -- the measure of how many U.S. internet users viewed newspaper web sites -- increased from 9.6 billion page views in the first half of 2oo4 to more than 20 billion in the first half of this year. And usage has grown from 39.2 pages per person in 2004 to 47.2 pages per person this year.

These figures show that newspapers' online audience has grown faster than the U.S. Internet population at large. The total number of Internet users grew from 204.3 million in the first half of 2004 to 227.6 million in the first half of 2009, an increase of 11.4%.