• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer, January 5, 2006

A recent release by Hitwise, sourced from information in the Hitwise U.S. service, concludes that trends in visits to News & Media sites are driven by major events. Significant spikes were seen in the past year during the 2004 elections, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the death of Terry Schiavo, the London bombings, and Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

Additional specific conclusions and observations about News and Media include:

• The leading news sites with the longest session times tend to be newspaper sites, while weather sites have the shortest session times.
• While search engines are the source of more than 20% of visits to News & Media sites, many sites under-utilize search as a reader acquisition tool.
• 64% of the top search terms sending visits to News & Media sites are navigational terms.
• Visitors to sites in the News & Media category tend to be older than the average Internet users - those over 55 years of age were 45% more likely to visit News & Media sites.
• Blogs, Wikipedia and Flickr are some of the new forms of consumer generated media that have grown significantly in the past year. These sites have captured Internet user attention during periods of high news interest, and they are more likely to have a higher proportion of visitors in the younger age groups.

Learn more about Hitwise and this report here.