I never ceased to be amazed by quite how well the indies in the UK website sector (that means Shiny Media, The Reg, Magicalia, Pocket-Lint) are doing. The Reg is way ahead with at least five million unique users per month.  Shiny Media has over a million users, Hecklerspray has over 300,000 and you’ll have to ask Stuart how Pocket-Lint is doing. There are games sites that have massive online readerships and Popbitch's reach is astronomical too.

To put that in some kind of perspective I read in Media Week the other day that FHM.com was very proud to have hit two million users per month. A good figure – but that’s from a global brand (FHM is big in the US too) backed by a major publishing company and after five years of investment.

In a profile of Rupert Murdoch recently in The Economist it was claimed that The Sunday Times, The Times, News of The World and The Sun between them reach six million unique users per month. Admittedly this sounds on the low side, but it is bizarre to think that Shiny Media's network of blogs, the oldest of which is barely two years old, are not far behind the online audience of some of the world’s oldest and most respected newspapers. Some of the bigger US blogs attract nearly two million users each day.

Does this mean that established old media brands are going to struggle against upstarts like ourselves in the new media era? Not necessarily, but it is clear that the old media brands that have ‘got their heads round’ blogging and seriously invested in it, that’ll be The Guardian then, will attract the young, tech-savvy audience that they desperately need. As for newspapers like this one who dabble in blogging but, judging by their first efforts don’t really have a clue how it all works, Murdoch’s pronouncement on the future of print might start haunting them a little sooner than they expected.