This story is significant in that no-one/ industry is exempt from dramatic shifts in the Internet space.  A 31% shift is not a result of adoption increases.

Newspaper websites averaged more than 55.5 million visitors a month in the first half of 2006, a 31 percent increase over the 42.4 million visitors over the same period a year ago, according to the Newspaper Association of America

Source: More Internet users visiting US newspaper websites: survey – Yahoo! News

I remain convinced that we will see a similar hockey stick effect in online banking one of these days. 

In the case of newspapers, we have seen a shift towards understanding their users, as they eliminate annoying registrations, and syndicate their content across RSS and other sites such as Yahoo.  Coupled with the online tenure of users accustomed to internet, and adoption of always on high speed, its a recipe for success for online newspapers (and death of paper ones).

For banking I see a convergence of a couple of things:

• online tenure – its statistically shown that once over 4 years online, users are significantly more likely to use online banking
• security and privacy concerns are being addressed with significant adoption of multi factor authentication
• adoption of security guarantees by all large banks
• front line employees will find it an easer sell for online banking based on the first three elements, but especially the security guarantee.  “Your money is guaranteed” is a surer bet than ” we have 128/ 256 bit encryption”

This convergence could be the catalyst to kick start online banking out of the 50/ 55% adoption range up to closer to the 80% internet adoption level.