• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, May 9, 2011

The news that the U.S. had killed Osama Bin Laden has pushed traffic to news and media sites to a three-year high, according to Hitwise. The traffic spike also underscores a key finding from a new report by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. "Casual users" -- those more likely to be drawn to major stories like the killing of bin Laden or the Japanese earthquake -- make up the majority of the online news audience.

The study of the top 25 U.S. news sites looked at four main areas: how people get to those sites, how long they stay during each visit, how deep they go into a site and where they go when they leave.

When it comes to how users navigate to news sites, Google is still the main outside entry point, driving on average 30% of their traffic. About 60% to 65% of visits are from direct traffic.) Most of the referrals stem from topic or news event-related searches like "Japan Tsunami" or "NCAA champion, men's, 2011."

Among branded news sites, such as NYTimes.com, ABC News and CNN, Google accounted for an average of 28.4% of traffic -- a significant chunk. The search giant's influence was much smaller on portals like Yahoo, AOL and MSNBC that compete with Google as news aggregators. Each drew more than 10% of traffic from Google.

But the Pew report also found Facebook is playing a growing role in driving traffic to news sites.

"In 2010, all but one of the top sites for which there was referral data derived at least some of their audience through Facebook. The one exception was Google News, whose content always links to other sites," it stated.

Facebook ranked as the second- or third-highest referral source for six of the largest 25 news sites, with Huffingtonpost.com getting the biggest share of traffic from the social network, at 8%. NYTimes.com got 6% of traffic from Facebook. Despite its growth, Twitter still isn't a factor in sending visitors to news sites, according to the report.

Still, Pew predicts that if searching for news was the most important trend of the last decade, sharing news via Facebook and other social media "may be among the most important of the next." In terms of usage, the vast majority of traffic (77%) to top news properties comes from casual users who visit just once or twice per month. Local news aggregator Examiner.com had the highest proportion of these light users (93%), followed by CBSNews.com (90%) and ABCnews.com (89%). Yahoo News had the lowest number of people who visited only once or twice, but it was still more than half (55%).

At the other extreme are the most loyal, or "power" users -- who visit more than 10 times a month, but make up an average of just 7% of visitors. CNN.com had the highest proportion of power users at 18%, followed by FoxNews.com (16%), Yahoo (14%), AOL News (13.4%), and Google News (12.6%).

"All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them," stated the report. "They may need, for instance, to develop one way to serve casual users and another way for power users. They may decide it makes sense to try to convert some of those in the middle to visit more often."

How long do people spend on news sites? The largest proportion, between 30% and 40%, spends less than five minutes per month. About 10% to 15% spend six to 10 minutes a month, and 1% to 5% browse news sites for 41 to 60 minutes. Less than 10% spend an hour or more.

When people leave news sites, the study found they tend to go to three places: a subdomain within a family of related properties; a news-sharing site, such as Facebook or AddThis; and Google, although not the search engine or Google News. "Users in these cases are accessing tools powered by Google, such as a map attached to a piece of content or screener questions often attached to email sign-up pages." Google drives traffic to news sites, and ends up getting it back again, in what it would view as a virtuous cycle.

When it comes to the age, news consumers to the lead news sites are on par with Internet users overall. This stands in contrast to news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to skew older, and may bode well for the industry, says Pew.