How many people use the Web for news? And is that number growing or has it stabilized?
In trying to understand the answers, three trends stand out:
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A majority of Americans now go online and most of them use the Web at least some of the time for news.
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Whether the new media are cannibalizing the old is less clear than some people think.
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While the audience may be growing, there seems to be a winnowing of the number of sites that dominate the Web for news.
Audience Overall
To get an accurate picture of how many people use the Internet for news, we must first start with the bigger picture of how many use the Internet at all.
At this most basic level - whether you ever go online - the numbers vary from just over half to 70 percent of Americans, depending on how the question is asked.1 [1] When pollsters ask about more regular usage - in the last month or the last week - the data point to a lower number, just over half of Americans in September 2003, according to ComScore Media Metrix.2 [2] The higher numbers are associated with only occasional use.
Online News Audience
What percent of these online users go there for news? Most of them do. According to surveys, anywhere from half to 70 percent of those online get news there.3 [3] Extrapolating, that would put the number of total online news users at 80 million to 105 million Americans.4 [4]
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Source: UCLA Center for Communication Policy, ‘’The UCLA Internet Report – Surveying the Digital Future,’’ January 2003, p. 18
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2000 to 2003
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Source: Pew Internet and American Life Project |
The Pew Internet Project found in June 2003 that 69 percent of people online had "ever" gotten news there. That was up from 60 percent three years before. Jupiter Research found in June 2003 that 55 percent of people online had gotten news there "monthly or more frequently" (up slightly from 53 percent a year earlier). A study at UCLA found that 52 percent of those online got news "during a typical week" in 2002.5 [7]
Another Pew Internet survey, which asks people if they went online for news "yesterday," found a smaller number, 26 percent, in June 2003. While this number is lower, getting news remains a perennial top activity online. This suggests that while online news use for many people is not yet a daily activity, its occasional use mirrors people's online use patterns in general.6 [8]
The Question Of Growth
Beyond the latest numbers, there is the question of whether online news use is still growing or whether it has peaked. Here, the data are conflicting.
Pew and Jupiter show the percentage of people that go online for news mostly growing. The UCLA study shows it fluctuating.
But even if the number is stable, if the number of people who go online overall is growing, then a steady percentage of news consumers would signify growth. Pinning this down, however, is difficult.
Pew Research Center data show online usage generally leveled off at around 62 percent in early 2001. The UCLA findings also show it basically flat since 2001. But Jupiter Research predicts that usage of the Internet overall will grow because it expects household penetration - the percentage of homes connected to the Internet - to rise from 63 percent in 2003 to 73 percent in 2007. That would be a gain of 14 million new online households, of which presumably more than half would become news consumers online.7 [9]
A shift from dial-up connections to high-speed cable modems and DSL is also occurring in America's homes. Nine months into 2003, 15 million homes had a cable modem, up 30 percent from the start of the year, according the National Cable and Telecommunications Association.8 [10] This makes getting news online quicker and easier, and opens the door to streaming video and vastly more amounts of data. In the years to come the shift to more bandwidth will transform online news.
The Online Appeal
What attracts people to online news? One appeal is convenience. Part of the rise in news consumption online is occurring at work, a place where in the past people generally did not have the time or means, or found it unacceptable to get news. A May 2003 study by the Online Publishers Association found that 62 percent of at-work Internet users visited a news site in a typical week. (A Jupiter survey in July 2003 found that a quarter of all people followed breaking news at work. Roughly half of the respondents did not have online access, so of those online, the figure would be closer to 50 percent).9 [11]
This, as online journalists are quick to point out, is essentially a new group of news consumers. Previously, most news consumption occurred largely at home, at morning and night. Sitting around the office reading the newspaper was frowned upon. Sitting in the office reading news on the computer apparently is not, or in any case is not forbidden.
When people go online for news, they break down into three distinct groups, according to studies of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. About half go online to see what the latest headlines are. Indeed, many online news operations say their "prime time" is the period from 1 to 3 p.m., when people are returning to their jobs after lunch or a mid-day activity. About 30 percent pursue news online after they have encountered it while doing something else online (for instance, checking out information on a portal and seeing the news displayed on the home page), and the rest are pursuing information about a story they have already heard about from another media source.10 [12]