There are two things that mark the success of an online venture: how many unique page views the website gets, and how long individuals spend on each page. Advertisers can pay by the page view, sure, but think about sites like NBC.com or Hulu, where the commercials run in accordance to how long you've been at the page.

What's tricky is in one of these respects, top Internet sites are doing better than ever. But in the other, they are doing significantly worse. Care to journey a guess?

Are people spending more time on their favorite sites, or less time on more sites?

The average time spent per person on newspaper Web sites declined in October year-over-year as monthly uniques soared.

Time per Person (hh:mm:ss): Oct. '08 - Oct.'07
NYTimes.com — 0:40:00 — 0:34:53
washingtonpost.com — 0:14:52 — 0:17:22
USATODAY.com — 0:19:31 — 0:16:13
LA Times — 0:09:00 — 0:09:51
Wall Street Journal Online — 0:13:34 — 0:14:19
Politico — 0:18:44 — 0:08:59

Sorry, the chart is confusing because it moves backwards, but you get the gist. The overall time spent on top sites like LA Times and Wall Street Journal decreased by almost a full minute. The sites that increased, increased substantially, like New York Times and Politico.

But the real story here is the double digit gain in unique visitors that the top 30 websites received, making it abundantly clear to anyone paying attention (Conde Nast? Portfolio?) that the future of low-overhead journalism involves the Internet. Because at a time when readership is down at almost every major publication, and the print industry falls another casualty every day, this is how people choose to get their news.

But tell us something we don't know.