• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, May 16, 2007

Gossip Blogs Impact News Consumption Patterns

The Hitwise US News and Media Report, on recent trends in online news consumption, shows that the share of traffic leaving the News and Media industry for Multimedia sites increased by 196 percent from April 2006 to March 2007. The report says that search engines are responsible for more News and Media category website traffic than ever before.

• Print News websites received 29.7 percent more traffic from Google in March 2007 than in March 2006
• Broadcast Media sites received 35.9 percent more traffic from Google in the same time period
• News Aggregators and portals were also significant sources of traffic for News and Media websites.

The market share of visits to the top 20 celebrity gossip blogs grew 42 percent from November 2006 to March 2007 as Internet users sought uncensored and up to the minute information on celebrity events. PerezHilton.com was one of the fastest growing sites in this category, and increased in market share of visits by 621 percent from March 2006 to March 2007.

LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise, said "News events in 2006 exposed Internet users to emerging sources of online information... search engine results from news video services... like YouTube and blogs were more likely to contain the information they sought, ... hastening the growth of non-traditional news sources."

Additional key findings from the report include:

The market share of visits to the top 10 News and Media websites declined by 3.8 percent from March 2006 to March 2007, indicating that news consumption is beginning to fragment

Digg is a social news website that has succeeded in attracting a young, tech-focused base of users. The bulk of its downstream traffic went to Entertainment, News and Media, and Blog websites, but it does not yet serve as a significant source of traffic to the News and Media industry

Local news consumption experienced an evolution with the rise of a local news aggregator and community website, showing an above average representation with users in rural states such as Kentucky and South Dakota, indicating success in engaging users in local communities in the US.

For a copy of the report please visit HitWise here.