2004 Annual Report - Online AudienceWhere People Go for Online News
The other major audience trend in online news is that there already appears to be a shakeout in popularity among sites. Pinning down where people go is complicated. But the best reckoning suggests not only that the big sites are getting bigger in terms of audience, but also that the very biggest are becoming runaway winners. Blogs The structure of the Web allows all people with Internet connections to post their own site with their own observations, which has resulted in the birth of millions of Web logs or "blogs," which can be periodically updated Web pages containing a single author's thoughts. For many people, this is the most exciting part of online journalism, the promise of the Web come to life. Measuring the total number of blogs is something of an impossible task. The number is certainly in the millions, thanks to easy access to hosting services and home pages. Perseus Development Corp., an Internet survey software company, estimated that the number of blogs on blog-hosting services to be 4.12 million. While this number is staggering, Perseus also estimated that 66 percent of these were abandoned. A quarter of all these blogs were only used once. Just 2.6 percent of the blogs (around 100,000) were updated weekly. Of the active blogs, only 10% linked to a traditional news site. And who is the average blogger? Perseus found that more than half (52 percent) of bloggers were teenagers and 40 percent were people in their 20s.17 On the other hand, this is a broader definition of bloggers than some have in mind. In some cases yesterday's influential print columnists are today's bloggers. Journalists like Mickey Kaus (formerly of The New Republic), Howard Kurtz (of The Washington Post), Virginia Postrel (former editor of Reason) and Rich Lowry (editor of National Review), are people whose blogs are often cited by the old media and thus whose influence reaches much farther than their direct audience. The Web log culture is fascinating and still evolving. Whether it will become a serious online presence and influence on journalism remains unclear. Several panelists at the Online News Association's 2003 conference predicted that 2004 would be the year of blogging.18 At this point, though, the hard data suggest that its influence, like journals of opinion in print such as The Nation or The Weekly Standard, will be more intellectual than commercial. In 2003, many political analysts credited conservative blogs for playing a role in the resignation of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott when the mainstream press did not do much with the story of his comments in favor of past segregation. Whether blogs come to define the Internet or represent only a small but appealing aspect of it, is still a question. Top Sites In contrast with the young and transitory nature of these 100,000 active bloggers, the biggest news sites appear to be stable and growing rapidly. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, traffic on the top 20 news sites on the Web grew by 70 percent from May 2002 to October 2003. That is far greater than any of the reported increases in either online users overall in 2003 or the percentage of those users who were going to all news sites. Many sites saw increases in visitors between the last six months of 2002 and the first six months of 2003. The Web sites of the cable news channels saw their audience sizes grow, Fox News by 45 percent, MSNBC by 21 percent and CNN by 7 percent. Yahoo and The Washington Post each had a 12 percent increase. Increases also occurred at the local level: Hearst's combined Web site traffic increased 18 percent and Gannett's rose 6 percent.19 The fact that traffic to these sites is swelling has a bearing on the economic side, too. As these sites draw sizable audiences, they will attract more advertising dollars. In October 2003, the top 20 sites drew an average of 8.5 million "unique visitors" - that is, 8.5 million individuals - per site. And the biggest of the big do even better. The two most popular sites for news, CNN and MSNBC.com, each attracted more than 20 million unique visitors in October. The next most popular news Web sites, Yahoo and AOL, attracted 17 million and 16 million a month, respectively. Some online executives say that their internal audience numbers are even higher, in part because at-work users are understated in the online audience ratings.
After the four biggest sites, there is a massive dropoff. The fifth site on the list averages half as many visits as AOL. And most of what makes up the rest are not single Web sites but combinations of various Web sites by a single owner (Gannett's 99 local newspapers or the combined sites of the Knight Ridder newspapers, for instance). After the big four, indeed, only two others on the top 10 list are actually individual sites, those of The New York Times and The Washington Post. In 2004, these top sites are poised to see continuing gains in audience as they pour resources into coverage of the political year. These sites are turning to a variety of tools, some unique to the web-including candidate backgrounders, access to voting records, matching users views to the candidates, allowing users to compare candidates by issue, and more during the presidential campaign.20 Time Spent When it comes to time spent, the list of the top four sites is slightly different than the top four in usage. The top four sites - The New York Times, Fox News, CNN and AOL - are consistently those that are able to keep visitors the longest, an average of over 29 minutes a month per unique visitor. The average for the rest is just under 19 minutes a month.24
Conclusion The Web is journalism's growth area. More people are going online everyday, and while the growth rate may be slowing, as is inevitable with new technologies, growth still is predicted to continue, and with it, so is consumption of news online. This may be causing some erosion in the use of old media, but it is not across the board. At least so far, the Internet may be hurting television viewing more than newspaper and magazine reading. Instead, the bigger question about the Web has to do with economics. 
2004 Annual Report - Online Audience |
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