Web Critical For Info On Japan's Earthquake, Tsunami Warnings

  • by March 16, 2011

NYT-B

As word spread of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami last Friday, plus tsunami warnings for Hawaii and the West Coast., U.S. visits to news and media Web sites soared. They surpassed even the numbers generated on the day of President Obama's election, according to Hitwise.

Heather Dougherty, Hitwise director of research, reported in her blog that visits to news and media sites comprised 7.23% of all U.S. Internet traffic that day, and were 50% higher than a week earlier.

The top three news and media sites were the same as on the previous Friday -- Yahoo News, MSNBC and CNN.com -- but up considerably in visits, while CNN.com Video rose to fourth place in the category, compared with No. 44 a day earlier.

Those sites were followed in popularity by Huffington Post, Foxnews World, Noticias Univision, NYTimes.com's Lede blog, BBC News and the National Weather Service.

Dougherty also noted that earthquake and tsunami-related terms made up five of the top 10 search terms driving traffic to the news and media category.

"Japan earthquake" was also the eighth-ranking search term driving traffic to all Web sites, with YouTube the second-largest recipient of those searches, trailing only MSNBC.

 

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