Online Ownership - 2006 Annual Report

Of the top 20 sites for 2005, 12 were individual sites. In addition to CNN, Yahoo, MSNBC and CNN, they include, in order, AOL, the New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, Google News, WashingtonPost.com, CBS News, Fox News, and BBC News. The rest were multiple sites whose totals are aggregated under one corporate roof, such as the combined Web sites of the newspapers of Knight Ridder or Gannett.

The site that exhibited the highest rate of growth this year was the BBC, which has been recognized not only for its strong international reportage but also for an increasing number of interactive tools for its readers. Those strengths became especially evident during major international events such as the tsunami and the London subway terrorist attacks. In 2005, the BBC News Web site averaged 5.6 million unique viewers, an increase of 30% over 2004.

As noted in our discussion of the newspaper industry, national newspapers like the New York Times and USA Today bucked the trend of declining print circulation in 2005. They also fared well online. The audience for those sites grew 19% and 15% respectively in 2005. Some papers with more regional print circulation, such as the Washington Post, which suffered declines in print circulation in excess of 6%, grew even more online. The Post’s Web site traffic in 2005 surge by 31%.

Another site that fared exceptionally well is Google News, which launched in September 2003 and emerged from its experimental or “Beta” testing stage in late January 2005. The front page of Google News is based on an algorithm that crawls the Internet for stories and ranks them according to what the algorithm deems most relevant. This often results in a mix of material from sources outside the mainstream news pool. In 2005, Google News averaged a monthly unique audience of 7.8 million visitors in the United States — an increase of 25%.

Of the other sites in the top 20, the collections of sites, in addition to Knight Ridder and Gannett, include a host of local TV news sites called Internet Broadcasting, Tribune Newspapers, Hearst Newspapers Digital, World Now, Advance Internet , and the Associated Press.) Some of these sites experienced strong growth while others showed sluggish growth or none at all. For example, World Now, a network of local news media, grew 26% in 2005. But Gannett grew only 5% and the Associated Press appeared to decline.5