News and Media Industry Trends The market share of visits to the top 10 News and Media websites declined by 3.8% from March 2006 to March 2007, indicating that news consumption is beginning to fragment as users expand their range of news sources to non-traditional news websites. Search engines, portal frontpages, and news aggregators were the leading sources of traffic to News and Media websites in March 2007. The share of visits to News and Media websites from search engines increased over the past year, with traffic from Google increasing by 29.7% for Print websites and 35.9% for Broadcast Media websites. Impact of Online Video Online video has had a major impact on the News and Media industry over the past year: the share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment – Multimedia websites increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007.
Events which involved user-generated video, such as in the death of Steve Irwin and the execution of Saddam Hussein, served to drive the increase in traffic between News and Media and Multimedia websites. Fast-Growing Websites and Emerging Trends Interest in online celebrity gossip news increased substantially in the past year, with the market share of visits to the top 20 celebrity blogs more than doubling from March 2006 to March 2007. Breaking gossip events involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith served to drive traffic to this category of websites, increasing awareness of blogs as a news source on this topic. Local news consumption experienced an evolution with the rise of Topix , a local news aggregator and community website. Its market share of visits increased by 81% from March 2006 to March 2007, and it showed above average representation with users in rural states such as Kentucky and South Dakota, indicating its success in engaging users in local communities in the US.
Digg is a social news website that has succeeded in attracting a young, tech-focused base of users. The bulk of its downstream traffic went to Entertainment, News and Media, and Blog websites in March 2007, but it does not yet serve as a significant source of traffic to the News and Media industry. In March 2007, there were 8,001 websites within the News and Media industry, which accounted for 3.31% of all US Internet traffic, or 1 in 30 Internet visits. The market share of visits to the News and Media industry declined slightly year-over-year, from 3.43% of all US visits in March 2006. At the same time, the number of websites ranking within the industry increased by 12.25%, from 7,128 websites in March 2006. This concurrent decline in market share and increase in number of websites could indicate that the industry is fragmenting as users discover new websites.
The Hitwise News and Media parent category is divided into five sub-categories: Broadcast Media, Print, IT Media, Weather, and Community Directories and Guides. This report will focus on trends in the News and Media parent category, as well as the Print, Broadcast Media, and IT Media sub-categories. In March 2007, the top 10 News and Media websites, as shown in Figure 2, accounted for 28.13% of visits to the industry. This represents a decline of 3.8% from March 2006, when the top 10 websites accounted for 29.24% of industry visits, again pointing to the fragmentation of online news consumption. The websites comprising the top 10 in the News and Media industry remain unchanged since March 2007, with the exception of Fox News replacing BBC News in the #10 spot. Yahoo! News was the top ranking News and Media website, and showed an increase in market share of 18.15% from March 2006 to March 2007.
Internet users navigate to News and Media websites in a variety of ways. Hitwise Clickstream data reveals that there are three major sources of traffic to News and Media websites: news aggregators (such as Yahoo! News, Google News and Drudge Report) search engines, and portal frontpages (such as Yahoo!, My Yahoo! and MSN). The balance of traffic from these three sources varies by sub-category, as shown in Figure 3 below.
