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Intro | Content Analysis | Audience | Economics | Ownership | News Investment | Public Attitudes | Conclusion | Charts & Tables
Audience
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.
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.
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.
Extrapolating, that would put the number of total online news
users at 80 million to 105 million Americans.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Cannibalization of Old Media?
If Web usage does continue to grow, including going online
to get the news, it raises a fundamental question: Will the
Web kill old media? One longstanding worry among traditional
news producers, particularly newspapers, is the fear that
as more people turn to online news, it will sharply accelerate
the pace at which their audience in the old media will shrink.
Research in this area, though, suggests that the threat of
technology may not be so cut and dry.
In 2002, nearly three-quarters of users (72 percent) said
that they spent the same amount of time reading print newspapers
today as they did before they began reading news online, according
to Jupiter Research. Less than a quarter (22 percent) reported
spending less time than before and a few, 3 percent, even
said they spent more.
A similar pattern holds true for print magazines.
The Web may be having a greater negative impact on television
news, but it still may not be as much as some people think.
In the Jupiter study, 36 percent of Internet users indicated
that their television viewing time has decreased since going
online, 14 percentage points more than for newspaper. About
61 percent said it was the same and 2 percent said it increased.
A 2000 survey from the Pew Research Center for the People
and the Press also found that those who regularly went online
reported watching less network television news than two years
earlier.
Fewer watched television news overall, and those who did watched
less of it. Meanwhile, viewing among those who did not go
online was unchanged.
Amount of Time
Online News Users Spent Reading Newspapers, 2002
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Weekly minutes, 2002
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Your Own Chart
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At the same time, however, the Web may be attracting young
people to news who have not gravitated to more traditional
media. While television and newspapers have been struggling
to find ways to attract younger viewers and readers, more
than 55 percent of Internet users aged 18 to 34 were getting
news online in a typical week in 2002.
The data from UCLA add another dimension to understanding
the question of cannibalization. They suggest that the Web
does not change the basic nature of a person's news consumption.
People generally can be put into one of three categories -
heavy, medium or light news consumers.
According to the UCLA data, heavy consumers of online news
are also heavy consumers of newspapers. They read newspapers
for an average of 225 minutes a week, a full 10 percent more
than the average of online and non-online users combined (which
is 201 minutes per week).
Similarly, medium consumers of online news report midlevel
usage of newspapers (159 minutes per week). And light consumers
of online news are light consumers of newspapers (144 minutes
per week, 28 percent less than the overall average). The Web
didn't change their behavior.
Thus the question of whether the Internet is cannibalizing
or supplementing other media is complicated. The heaviest
users online are also heavy users of old media. And while
some substitution is going on, getting people interested in
news online could also get them interested in news elsewhere.
All this has implications. It suggests, we would theorize,
that news executives perhaps should be less worried about
one medium cannibalizing another and more worried about making
the news more engaging, relevant and interesting generally,
and making their advertising and sponsorship strategies more
valuable to the people paying for their products.
At least for now, people spend less time getting news online
than they do getting it from other mediums. People report
spending roughly two hours a week acquiring news online, a
full hour less than they spent reading newspapers, and nearly
half an hour less than they did reading magazines. Online
news consumption appears to be a way of getting certain kinds
of news - perhaps updates, news pertaining to work, looking
at something a co-worker has mentioned - but it may be a different
kind of consumption than for newspapers and magazines. If
that inference is correct, it may be another sign that the
mediums may complement each other.
Where People Go Online for 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.
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.
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.
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.
Average
Monthly Unique Visitors for Top 20 News Web Sites
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May 2002 Through
November 2003
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Design
Your Own Chart
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Top
News Web Sites
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By average monthly unique visitors, January through
October 2003
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Your Own Chart
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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.
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.
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.
Click
here to view footnotes for this report
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