Has online news consumption in the UK reached saturation point?

When it comes to predicting trends in the future of journalism, FleetStreetBlues has next to no qualifications. Unlike the Peter Prestons, Roy Greenslades or Jeff Jarvises of this world, we've never edited a national newspaper, taught a journalism class or pioneered reporting in a new medium - and while we write this blog in our spare time, we don't spend all day talking about and writing about where newspapers are heading.

But with that disclaimer, we couldn't help being struck by this story over at the Press Gazette, reporting the latest figures from UKOM/Nielsen on online news readership in the UK.

Unlike the more widely-quoted ABC stats, which cite the increasingly stratospheric figures for the number of unique browsers accessing a website worldwide, the UKOM/Nielsen stats are based, like TV viewing figures, on a poll of a small sample - in this case 50,000 internet users in the UK. And the findings are pretty interesting.

The top ten UK news websites in May were as follows (with unique audience and percentage change year-on-year in brackets).

1) BBC (11.1m; -12%)
2) MailOnline (6.3m); +12%)
3) Guardian.co.uk (5.2m; -2%)
4) Telegraph (5.0m; -7%)
5) Yahoo! News Websites (4.5m; -11%)
6) Newsquest Local Media (2.8m; +12%)
7) Trinity Mirror Nationals (2.6m; +3%)
8) The Sun (2.6m; -15%)
9) MSN News & Weather (2.3m; -23%)
10) The Independent (2.1m; +3%)

Stripped of the easy year-on-year inflation provided by expansion overseas, the figures make sobering reading - as do the rest of the top 40 websites.  The BBC, Guardian, Telegraph and the Sun all have fewer online UK readers this year than they did in 2010.

What does this mean? Well, either certain high profile sites are doing badly, and will be replaced in time by up-and-coming sites (and it's worth acknowledging at this point the rise and rise of MailOnline, among UK readers as well as those overseas).

Or else, more than a decade after the advent of online news, the big shift from print to digital is almost over. Everyone who's interested in reading news on the internet already is.

There are lots of confounding factors to this kind of simplistic analysis, of course. Increasing dominance of social media, for one. iPhones and iPads. The chance of a second life for broadcast journalism promised by 4G mobile networks is another.

But for the last ten years the main commercial strategy for most print publishers has been to grow and grow an online audience, in the hope that it will eventually get big enough to somehow make some serious money. Now the early days of the internet are almost over, that audience has grown, and FleetStreetBlues isn't sure we've yet figured out how it pays journalists' wages.

It's not yet clear what the figures released yesterday by the Times really mean - and there are still lots of unanswered questions about drop-off rates and corporate subscriptions and the like. But suddenly, having 100,000 people actually paying to read you online doesn't seem to be a bad place to be.