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between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month.
1
Even if, as some suggest,
online data tend to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and
undercounting repeat visits, casual users till would be the largest single group.
• There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be
called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and
spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at
least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly,
from as high as 18% (at CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at BingNews.com).
• Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry
point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.
• Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring
source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic.
Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users
leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-
on links.
• When it comes to the age, news consumers to the top news websites are on par with Internet
users overall. This stands apart from news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to
skew older, and may bode well for the industry.
All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving
audiences and also for monetizing them. They may need, for instance, to develop one way to serve
casual users and another way for power users. They may decide it makes sense to try to convert some of
those in the middle to visit more often. Or they may try to make some of their loyal audience stay longer
by creating special content. Advertising may help monetize some groups, while subscriptions will work
for others. And the strategy that works best for each site may differ.
What’s more, with the development of mobile, these layers will almost certainly multiply.
The study builds off of
our 2010 NetView analysis of the top roughly 200 news sites in the United States,
those that, by Nielsen’s count, averaged at least 500,000 unique U.S. visitors per month. In the new
report, PEJ narrowed the focus to the top 25 sites. Despite the rapid growth of eReader and tablet
devices, most online news consumption still occurs on browser. Only between 7-10% of the population
currently owns a tablet or e-reader. The study, which examined nine months of consumer data spanning
the first three quarters of 2010, sheds light on the significance of search aggregators and social
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Some experts believe that traditional online metrics undercount Website loyalty because “unique visitors”
actually count computers, not people. So if the same user visits a site from a different computer, he or she would
be counted more than once. Still, these numbers suggest that a good deal of online news consumption involves
people arriving casually, often through referrals from search engines or social media. This is discussed more in the
section on How Users interact with News.