Commentary

Top 3 Sites Provide 20% Of Online News

While the audience for news has been “fragmenting,” according to the jargon of a decade ago, the business of delivering this news is becoming more concentrated.

In fact, the three biggest online publishers and news aggregators provide one-fifth of all news consumed online, according to a new analysis of Web activity conducted by SimilarWeb, a digital market intelligence research outfit.

MSN, ESPN, and conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report together account for a remarkable 20% of all online news consumed by U.S. audiences, SimilarWeb found. Together, the three sites generated a total of over 4 billion page-views across desktop and mobile channels in April.

That’s one-fifth of the total produced by the top 300 most-visited news sites, including these three.

Interestingly, all three sites receive a relatively small proportion of their visitors from social-media platforms in comparison to smaller publishers. ESPN received 9% of its traffic from social media in April, while MSN received 1.1% and Drudge had no social-media referrals at all.

This suggests that direct visits to these Web sites (as well as search) constitute the bulk of their traffic, which in turn, indicates a high level of reader awareness and loyalty for these particular sites.

For comparison, BuzzFeed (the seventh-largest U.S. news site) gets 43% of its desktop traffic from social media, with 80% coming from Facebook, 10% from Pinterest, and 6% from Twitter. Meanwhile, The New York Times, the country’s sixth-largest publisher, get 13% of desktop traffic from social media, while The Huffington Post, in eighth place, gets 17%. 

A new generation of social-first publishers is also emerging. Most notably, fast-growing newcomer Little Things, which provides positive lifestyle content, gets 91% of its desktop traffic from social media, with 99% of this coming from Facebook.

Back in January, I wrote about a previous study by SimilarWeb, which found that the top 10 publishers, together owning around 60 news sites, accounted for 47% of total online traffic to news content last year, while the next-biggest 140 publishers accounted for most of the other half.

The biggest online news publisher for the U.S. audience in 2015 was MSN, owner of MSN.com, with just over 27 billion combined page views across mobile and desktop, followed by Disney Media Networks, owner of ESPN and ABC News, with 25.9 billion. Time Warner, owner of CNN and Bleacher Report, had 14.8 billion.

That is followed by Yahoo with 10.3 billion, and Time, Inc. with 10.2 billion. CBS Corp., owner of Cnet.com, had 9.9 billion combined page views; NBC Universal, 9.5 billion; Drudge, 8.5 billion; Advance Publications, 8 billion; and Fox Entertainment Group, owner of Fox News, 7.9 billion.

Next story loading loading..