2005 Annual Report - Online Ownership

Local News 

Looking further down the list, another distinction is worth noting. Several of the names are not actually single Web sites, but aggregations of various sites owned by the same company, such as Gannett's local newspapers, or those of Knight Ridder.

Of the top sites for the first ten months of 2004, 12 were actually single sites. In addition to CNN, Yahoo! and MSNBC, they include, in order, AOL, The New York Times, USA Today, ABC News, Google News, WashingtonPost.com, Fox News, CBS, and the BBC.

Some of the strongest growth online was occurring at those sites operating at the local level. For the first ten months of 2004, Gannett and Knight Ridder, which report the traffic of all their newspapers' Web sites in aggregate, saw increases of 37% and 22%, respectively, over the previous year.³ And Internet Broadcasting Systems, a company that operates local-TV news Web sites, experienced an increase of 36%.

New Players in the Top 20

Still a third story line in online news growth in 2004 involves two other sites, the Associated Press's CustomNews service and Google News, which gained footholds in the top 20 news sites for the first time.

AP CustomNews is designed primarily for smaller sites. The AP sends stories to a site in the newspaper's own design and structure, thereby requiring minimal investment in hardware, bandwidth or staff.⁴ Over the first ten months of 2004, AP CustomNews received 6.2 million unique visitors a month.

Google News is unique among the news sites in the top-20 list in 2004. In addition to its famous search engine, which allows visitors to search for a seemingly endless supply of news stories on topics they are interested in, the site uses a computer algorithm that selects headlines based on how and where the stories appear in other places on the Web. ⁵ While the headlines are often from major players like Reuters.com, they are frequently news stories from obscure and unorthodox news and political sites. The site grew from 4.1 million unique visitors in January 2004, the first time it was reported, to 7.5 million two months later. Over all, from January through October, it averaged six million unique visitors a month.