The September tally represents a 10% jump over the previous high of 1.16 million in October 2001. (See graph below.)

The jump in daily users puts the site’s daily readership solidly beyond the newspaper’s 1.2 million weekday circulation. An average of 1.3 million unique daily users is projected for October, Calder said. Summer months are always slow, he said.

I talked to Calder because I had been looking at the site’s published traffic figures, which ran only through August. These suggested that the site had hit a ceiling around 1.1 million unique daily users. This would have correlated with the sideways drift in US Internet user figures.

Figuring I could either report "the plateau” or do some fact checking, I decided to contact New York Times Digital. If traditional media can interview bloggers, why not vice versa?

NYTDigital spokesperson Christine Mohan put me in touch with Calder, who delivered the numbers. Calder attributed the growth both to increased value delivered to the site's pool of registered users and to the public’s demand for reliable information in stressful times.

Cannibalization is not an issue, says Calder. On the contrary, the site is “critical to newspaper's growth in national markets and younger user groups,” he said.

“As a whole, the newspaper industry is challenged by fact that readers are getting older and aren’t reaching a whole generation brought up on AOL and CNN. We've been extremely successful in offsetting this,” Calder said.

The paper’s typical reader is 45, while the site’s average reader is 35, said Calder. And while 85% of the website’s users come from outside the New York designated marketing area, 44% of the daily’s readers are inside the area.

Since January, NYTDigital has been examining the overlap between site users and the newspaper’s readership and found that only 8% of site users are also print subscribers.

Growth in daily usage of the site comes because NYTimes.com is wringing more visits from its pool of nearly 11 million registered users, said Calder. A year ago, NYTimes.com aspired to attain an 18% retention rate, meaning that 18% of the site’s total registered users visited the site at least once in a given month. Today, retention is 30%, Calder said.

The site generated 85,000 new home delivery starts in 2001, up from 25,000 in 2000. Through September 30 this year, the site generated another 58,000. (My calculator annualizes that to 77,000.)

“We were their most cost-effective and efficient means of acquiring subscribers,” said Calder. Since online subscriptions are charged to a credit cards, people aren’t canceling, he notes.

“We work very closely with the circulation department,” he said. “Even if you are not ready to subscribe today, when you do get to that point, you have a great affinity for the brand and product.”

I asked Calder to rate the relative importance of different strategies within the total marketing effort. He said NYTimes.com's e-mail newsletters accounts for 30% of marketing return, headline distribution deals are 40%, keyword targeting with Overture and Google is 10%, and search engine optimization is 10%. The last 10% is miscellaneous experiments.

E-mail newsletters The site now sends out 3.5 million “Today's Headlines” e-mails, up from 1 million in January 2001. Niche newsletters range from 85,000 for “In Advertising” to 290,000 for "Book Digest." Eight of 12 newsletters have 150,000+ subscribers.

NYTimes.com launched the “Sophisticated Shopper,” a compendium of “special offers” this summer and already has 101,000 users. These users were acquired through in-house promotions like banners and notes to the 2 million people who accept e-mail updates from the site. All NYTimes.com e-mail technology is managed in-house, he said.

Headline distribution The site recently negotiated a deal to run headlines on AOL for free. In addition, NYTimes.com pays Altavista, Yahoo, MSN and Netzero between 1 and 3 cents per click for visitors referred by headlines posted on those sites.

Nothing conveys the brand more succinctly than a headline, he said. “This is much more effective than two years ago when we were paying 25 cents a click for banners,” Calder said.

Search engines NYTimes.com has devoted attention to its appearance in search engines, but the site’s performance is constrained by registration and padlocked archives. Calder did not have figures on the initial impact of News.Google.

After achieving operating profits for each quarter since Q2 2001, NYTimes Digital is on track to achieve an operating profit for the year in 2002. Combined with the staff of Boston.com, NYTimes Digital has 220 staff, with 15 of those involved in marketing. Calder said the site does not release figures for what it spends on online marketing.

Henry Copeland in Amherst MA