2004 Annual Report - Online Audience

Did the Internet become a major source of news during the war in Iraq?

The data suggest that during the short but intense period of the war, the Internet did enjoy a boon, much moreso than nightly network news, but not quite as great as did cable television news.

Apparently the convenience of the Web makes it a place to go during moments of crisis, but for some things, there is no substitute for "seeing" the news, especially when cameras are there, recording the combat. The Web also offered viewers easy access to other views, such as those from newspapers elsewhere in the world.

The war brought a surge in Web traffic to various sites. During the first full week of the war, March 17-23, CNN.com's work audience shot up to over 10 million unique visitors, an increase of 58 percent over the previous week, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. MSNBC.com had a 38 percent increase in its at-work audience to 8 million unique visitors. The Fox News Web site, which has a considerably smaller number of unique visitors, had an increase of its at-work audience of 78 percent (to 2 million unique visitors) in the first week of the war.²¹

According to surveys by the Pew Internet Project, the Web sites that people gravitated to most were those of established institutions - first television network news sites, then newspaper sites, then United States government sites and then foreign news sites. Bloggers were last on the list of places people said they went.²²

Not every site had an increase in at-work visitors. AOL had a 10 percent decrease in visitors for the week, despite experiencing an increase in traffic for the month. Perhaps this site is seen less as a place to go for first-alert or instantaneous information than it is for information over time. People went to the cable television networks' sites to get the latest information at work, due to these channels' reputations for staying on top of breaking news.

According to the Nielsen//NetRatings list of the top 20 Web sites, as war became reality, traffic to these sites swelled. In January, the average number of monthly unique visitors to these sites stood at just over 7 million. This rose to 8.8 million in March and 8.5 million in April. Traffic then dipped at the end of combat, leveling off at 8.2 million in August.

Traffic was not confined solely to the large American sites. One of the key assets of gaining access to news on the Internet appears to be the ability to visit sites around the world. During the war, users took advantage of this fact. For instance, the three news Web sites with the biggest increases from February to March were all from outside the United States, according to Nielsen//NetRatings. Aljazeera.net, the Web site of the Arabic satellite television station Al Jazeera, had the largest growth, up 1,200 percent from the month before. The BBC and Reuters had growth on their Web sites of 158 percent and 72 percent, respectively.²³