Here are some interesting worldwide website traffic rankings from Alexa.com showing how newspapers are faring online. I’ve concluded that the sites with lots of original content and minimum barriers to entry do the best with the New York Times and the Washington Post the only general news sites that can get away with registration and keep high numbers. The New York Times is far ahead of the others as it has a lot of web-only content. The Wall Street Journal charges for visiting, but it’s content is specialized, original and valuable to a targeted audience. Marketwatch has a quasi-registration system but again it’s specialized for investors and all of its content is original. If I were any of these people I’d be concerned that Drudge — a one-man shop — can achieve its high ranking doing almost no work and just publishing gossip and cast off material. What we see here are top-tier news organizations sitting at the bottom of this list.

And I should mention that most of the trendlines are flat.