• by Masha Geller , April 25, 2003

The March web surfing tallies are beginning to come in and it looks like Americans spent the month surfing international, as well as domestic news sites in record numbers. Nielsen//NetRatings says it was alternative coverage of the war in Iraq that was the major draw.

"While established news sources maintained their strong audience levels, the war in Iraq also sparked interest in different perspectives on world events," said Greg Bloom, senior Internet analyst, Nielsen//NetRatings. "The Web catered to that curiosity by allowing Americans to complement their mainstream domestic news sources with an international perspective not as readily available during the first Gulf War in 1991."

Aljazeera.net experienced a 1,208% increase in traffic in March 2003, drawing more than one million surfers from the U.S. About a third of these surfers, or 328,000, visited the English version of the site, which launched last month. British news site, BBC World Service surged 158% to 5.3 million surfers in March, attracting 3.2 million more unique visitors since February 2003. Both Aljazeera.net and BBC World Service drew predominantly male visitors comprising nearly 70% of the sites' total audience.

Traffic to Reuters.com jumped 72% month-over-month, posting more than 2.1 million visitors. Like many other news sites, Reuters launched special streaming media content and coverage during the war. Newsmax.com and Fox News followed, increasing site traffic 51 and 43%, respectively.

CNN and MSNBC, the two biggest online news sources in the U.S. continued their dominance in the overall rankings, attracting 26.2 and 24.3 million unique visitors in March, with both sites increasing traffic by nearly a quarter over the previous month.