2005 Annual Report - Online Ownership

Survey data about what kinds of sites people go to for online news help explain the increases seen among sites like Yahoo! Such sites don't create original content but rather pull together and pass along information from other sources. More people report regularly going to news pages such as Yahoo! or AOL than to any other form of Web site (13%), according to the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, followed by network TV news sites (10%). Just 3%, on the other hand, report regularly going to opinion or online magazine sites.⁶

Destination of Online News Consumers

Another polling company, MORI Research, looked at where people go specifically for local news and found that internet service providers' pages were making headway there as well. For now, local newspapers are still the most popular places, but the data suggest their popularity is declining and facing stiff competition from Google. According to the MORI data, 40% of people who go online for local news use newspaper Web sites, down from 62% in 2002. Google, on the other hand, went from less than 3% in 2002 to 39% in 2004. Yahoo!, meanwhile, seems also to have lost ground as a local news source online, declining as a destination from 55% in 2002 to 37% in 2004.⁷