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Intro | Content Analysis | Audience | Economics | News Investment | Ownership | Charts & Tables
Audience
By the Project for Excellence
in Journalism
Introduction
The Web in 2008 became a regular and even primary news destination for more and more Americans.
Several surveys found that the number of Americans who used the Web regularly for news jumped. And at least for some news the Internet has now overtaken most other media as a favored news delivery platform.
One poll, in December 2008, found the number of Americans who said they got “most of their national and international news” online increased 67% in the last four years.1
The presidential election was almost certainly a key factor in the growth. More than a third of Americans said they got most of their campaign news from the Internet in 2008 — triple the percentage in previous presidential election year.2
The growth in online news consumption cut across age groups, but the growth was fueled in particular by young people. Young voters and activists now rank the Internet as a news source of importance parallel to television.3
And the shift was likely not just a matter of changing audience tastes. News organizations and the political community both were also more aggressive about delivering news and information online, and giving consumers more ways to gather, organize and share it across multiple devices. From personalized news pages sent to a person’s e-mail, delivery of content on “smart” mobile phones, news-ranking sites that list the most-recommended news stories and more sharing of content among news producers, what was available from the traditional news media digitally was richer, even if much of this was the same information simply made more readily available.
Add to that social networking sites like Facebook. And the video site YouTube also became a major delivery system for people to get news posted and recommended by friends and associates, and often from political campaigns. The Obama camp reported more than a billion minutes of campaign-produced material was downloaded from YouTube. And Youtube reported that the Obama campaign’s 1800 web videos were viewed 100 million times in total.4
Internet News Use
By any number of yardsticks, the traffic to news websites jumped in 2008.
According to a PEJ analysis of comScore data, the average number of unique visitors to the top 50 news sites each month grew 27% in 2008 over the year before.5 The number of monthly unique visitors to all 700 news and information sites measured by comScore grew 7%.
Comparing one media platform to another can be complicated, given the different ways different media are measured. Often the clearest reference is found in survey data.
According to Pew Research Center data, as of August 2008 the percentage of Americans who went online regularly for news (at least three times a week) was up 19% from two years earlier to nearly four in ten Americans (37%). No other medium was growing as quickly. Most saw audiences flat or declining.
The new numbers put the Web ahead of several other platforms for the first time. In the same August survey, 29% of Americans said they “regularly” watched network nightly news, 22% watched network morning shows and 13% Sunday morning shows.
The percentage of Americans who relied on the Internet regularly, according to this data, was now roughly similar to that who regularly watched cable television for news (39%).
More people still read a newspaper “yesterday” (34%) or listened to news radio (35%) than had viewed news online “yesterday” (29%). But the gap was narrowing.6
The biggest jump came in the number of people relying on the Web for national and international news in particular. In December, 40% of Americans said they got most of their national and international news online, up 67% from 2004, the last presidential election year, when the number was 24%. That put the web ahead of newspapers (35%). Only television, cable, local and network combined, ranked higher (70%).7
Other surveys reinforced the notion of a jump in online news consumption. In November 2008, for instance, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found 36% of Internet users said they now used the Web for news on a “typical day,” a 16% jump from two years earlier (December 2006) when the number was 31%.
The numbers, it is important to note, refer to the platform by which people acquired their news, not the source gathering it. Virtually all of the most popular news websites are those associated with traditional news organizations, whose legacy platforms are paying for the news gathering, or are aggregators, which collect content from traditional newsrooms and wire services rather than produce their own. But given the financial implications of the Web on the news business, the numbers are no less significant.
This growth in online news consumption was not due to more people using the Internet generally. The percent of people who go online for any reason has held fairly steady at 70% to 75% of the U.S. population since 2006.
But those who go online do it more often and for longer periods of time than in the past, and they increasingly seek news. Since 2004, for instance, the percentage of online Americans saying they went online “yesterday” increased from 58% to 72%. And the number logging on multiple times a day from home jumped from 27% to 34%.8 Another study found that over the last three years, the amount of time the average user spent online increased from 14 hours a week in 2006 to over 17 hours as of January 2009.9
Consider that that in January 2009, the Digital Future Report from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School found that 79% of adult users said the Internet was now their “most important” source of information (not just for news), higher than television (68%) or newspapers (60%). Getting news online, in other words, has become more of a reflex and a larger part of people’s daily lives.10
For all this, one other factor has remained constant in Internet news trends: the people who go online for their news tend to be more educated. That has not changed over the last decade even as the number of online news users has grown.
Ten years ago a college graduate was more than three times as likely as someone with a high school education or less to regularly go online for news. That gap remains just as large today. Fully 61% of college graduates go online for news at least three days a week, compared with just 19% of those with no more than a high school education.11
Beyond demographics, the accelerating move by audiences generally to the Web just deepens the paradox facing the news business.
As their audience migrates online, and the old media continue to build their offerings there to service them, the media are properly developing their market share in the new media environment. The more success legacy news operations have online, however, the more damaging it is to their current revenue base, since the Internet increasingly cannot pay for itself from any of the current economic models (see Online Economics).
Internet Audiences and the Election
Almost certainly a major reason for the surge in online news consumption in 2008 was interest in the election. While television remained the dominant delivery source, the percent of Americans who said they got most of their campaign news from the Internet tripled between October 2004 and October 2008. Fully a third (33%) reported getting most of their election news online, up from the 10% who did so four years earlier.12
By the last week of the election, 59% of voters said they had sought out or encountered at least some political information online.13
Young people were a major factor in that growth. Nearly three times as many people ages 18 to 29 cited the Internet (49%) as their main campaign news platform as mentioned newspapers (17%).14
Among those over age 50, nearly the opposite was true: 22% relied on the Internet for election news while 39% look to newspapers. Even with that, compared with 2004, use of the Internet for election news has increased across all age groups. Among the youngest cohort (age 18-29), television has lost significant ground to the Internet.15
Most Popular News Sites
Which news sites were enjoying this boost in traffic? The evidence suggests growth across a range.
To some extent, the biggest Web sites got even bigger. The top four news sites alone, for example, increased their audience by 22% in 2008, according to data from comScore, or a combined 23.6 million visitors a month. That rate of increase is more than twice as fast as in 2007 and more than five times the rate in 2006. At Yahoo News, the most-visited news site according to comScore, the number of visitors rose by 13% for the year. The number rose 24% at No. 2 MSNBC.com, 34% at No. 3 CNN.Com, and 20% at No. 4 AOL News.
(Tracking the exact order of which of these sites is first, second or third is complicated by the fact that the different measuring agencies use different methodologies, but all show substantial growth).
The traffic data also suggest that a host of niche sites that barely registered or did not exist during the previous presidential election also benefited. Huffingtonpost.com, a news aggregator, producer and blogging website, for example, catapulted into the 20 most-visited sites in September 2008, according to data from comScore, with 4.5 million users during the month, an increase of 474% compared with September 2007.16
Politico.com, which started in 2007 (see New Ventures Section) with a focus on national politics, increased fivefold to 2.4 million visitors between September 2007 and 2008. RealClearPolitics.com, which aggregates political news and polling, grew 489% during that period.17
Audience Growth: Top News Sites vs. Select Political Sites |
September 2007 vs. September 2008
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Design Your Own Chart |
But even with those gains, traffic to those sites remained a fraction of what the leading news sites drew. As a group, HuffingtonPost.com, RealClearPolitics.com and Politico.com drew an average of 3.9 million more visitors per month in 2008 than in 2007. To put that into perspective, Yahoo News.com gained 4.5 million by itself. The evidence clearly suggests that while a variety of new sites grew, in general, the big got even bigger, extending their share of Internet traffic.
After the election, some of these niche sites were more successful than others at retaining those audiences. In December, the Huffington Post still drew 81% of the viewers it did in September and October, when interest in the campaign was highest. Salon.com, the left-leaning online magazine, retained 77%. Two newer sites, however, did not do as well. Politico’s website kept just about half its audience. And the Real Clear Politics website, which had grown in advance of the election, kept only 21%.18
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Top News Sites (Hitwise), 2008
|
Website |
Domain |
Market Share Rank |
| Yahoo News |
news.yahoo.com |
1 |
| CNN.com |
www.cnn.com |
2 |
| MSNBC.com |
www.msnbc.com |
3 |
| Google News |
news.google.com |
4 |
| Drudge Report |
www.drudgereport.com |
5 |
| The New York Times |
www.nytimes.com |
6 |
| Fox News |
www.foxnews.com |
7 |
| USA Today |
www.usatoday.com |
8 |
| BBC News |
news.bbc.co.uk |
9 |
| The Washington Post |
www.washingtonpost.com |
10 |
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New Modes of News Consumption
Not only were more people getting their news from the Internet in 2008, but they also were doing it in new and different ways, much of it enabled by news organizations developing more ways of disseminating their content. Mobile viewing, the sharing of stories on social networks and video sites, and posts on a multitude of microblogs became more widespread in 2008 while earlier tools like also e-mail and RSS remained popular. By compiling, sharing and customizing the news they consume, people in a sense are becoming not only their own editors, but also critical agents in the trajectory of a news story.
Mobile News
The technology that got some of the greatest attention in 2008 was mobile phone communication. Purchases of iPhones, BlackBerries and other smartphones grew rapidly in 2008. In the first quarter of the year alone, smartphone sales totaled 7.3 million units, a 106.2 percent increase from the same period in 2007.21 And news outlets began more aggressively to take advantage of this digital platform to deliver instantly updated text, audio and images.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project found in March 2008 that 62% of all American adults had used the Internet through a wireless connection: 58% had used their cellphone or personal digital assistant for things other than talking; and 41% had logged onto the Internet away from home or office with a handheld devices or laptop computer. Many, of course, had made such connections both ways.22 By the end of the year, according to Nielsen Mobile, there were about 40 million active users of the mobile Web.23 That amounts to one-fourth the universe of the 160 million adult using the Internet on computers.
With that large and growing usage, mobile phones seem destined to become a major mode of information delivery. Two challenges face news companies as a consequence. First, they must compete with the dozens of other applications available for smartphones, such as navigational aids, music sites, games and video viewers. Second, they need to find a way to make money on a platform that may be even less suited than computers to display advertising.
While the traffic numbers are there, and despite much talk of mobile advertising revenue, ads have as yet proved difficult to display in this platform and the question of how audiences would receive them remains unanswered. And if it is not going to be advertising, is there another revenue source for news from mobile? Like much of the digital revolution, that is unclear.
Still, several major players have moved to accommodate the mobile technology. The New York Times and the Associated Press have invested heavily in delivery options for users of smart phones. Both are primarily focused on attracting mobile users to their content with the hope that a model for making money will follow.
The New York Times began preparing its content for mobile phones in 2006. By July 2008, it had an active mobile Web page with downloadable tools, including an application for the Apple iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle, a digital reader that delivers print in a user-friendly and eye-friendly format.
The Associated Press’s Mobile News Network, opened in May 2008, provides access to international, national and local news from a network of local media sources and its own Washington and foreign correspondents.24 The project cost millions of dollars to start, according to Jeff Litvack, the AP’s global director of news media markets.25
Mobile phone users can access the Mobile News Network by visiting its mobile site. The application provides continually updated news, photos and video.
The Mobile News Network is the first product released by the AP’s Digital Cooperative, an initiative aimed at finding new digital outlets for news and information produced by AP members. The network was initially tailored first for the iPhone to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities. But later in the year the network created applications for other smartphones, including BlackBerry.26 In September, the mobile network content received more than 26 million page views.27
The AP said the network attracts revenue for its members from two streams: local ads sold by member news organizations and national ads sold by national ad networks contracted by the AP. The net revenue is split between the provider of the content, a local news organization or AP staff, and the seller of the ad, which could be the news organization’s ad staff or the AP’s national ad network. For example, if the Nashville Tennessean gets a story on the network that is accompanied by an ad placed by the national ad network, the revenue gets split between the Gazette and the national ad network. But if the same story is accompanied by an ad sold by the Gazette’s sales staff, the Gazette gets to keep 100% of the proceeds.28
The trend is not limited to national-scale news producers. The Cincinnati Enquirer in 2008 maintained a mobile website that offered personalization options and the ability to receive customized text messages. The Enquirer’s mobile website gets more than 500,000 page views per month.29
Mobile technology jumped forward in 2008 as Apple released its iPhone with 3G, and Blackberry followed with a 3G phone of its own. The 3G technology gives fast access to the Internet and e-mail over cellphone networks worldwide. The high-bandwidth network also makes it possible to more efficiently surf the Web, download e-mail, get directions and watch video.
In October, Google released its open-source operating system, Android, which can be run on almost any mobile phone. It can essentially make any smartphone perform the same functions as an iPhone. It offers free wireless use and allows for easy addition of applications from anyone who takes the time to create one.
Applications, or apps, are Web-based tools that allow users to do anything from streaming video to finding nearby restaurants. Apple had 1,700 applications for sale by late 2008, and its technology strictly limits where users can obtain applications.
Google, by contrast, hopes its open-source approach, which allows anyone and everyone to develop applications, will eventually challenge the popularity of the iPhone.
(Google has not publicly discussed its revenue model for Android. Reportedly, the company is going to incorporate its online advertising platforms within Android's applications.30)
Social Networking
A growing number of internet users also turned to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook to share information in 2008. These sites allow users to create profiles and swap messages, photos and links to other Web pages with a circle of friends. During 2008 alone, the number of people visiting social networking sites grew by 9% to 104 million.31
Fewer in number than the people using mobile phones, social networking appears to be especially popular among the young, African Americans and liberal Democrats.32
In August 2008, 30% of those with social networking profiles said they at least occasionally got local, national or international news through these sites.33 About a quarter said they share news on their network pages.
Micro-blogs
Americans also turned in greater numbers in 2008 to “micro-blogs” like Twitter for breaking news. Twitter is a digital social networking service that allows its users to send and read other users’ messages — usually text messages of no more than 140 characters in length.
Between December 2007 and December 2008, unique visitors to the site grew more than tenfold, to 2 million. That compared to 20% growth between December 2006 (soon after it launched in July 2006) and December 2007, according to comScore.
By 2008, the journalistic applications for Twitter became more apparent. Producers of content have found value in offering one-line descriptions that link to larger pieces of work. News audiences turned to Twitter feeds for eyewitness accounts of real-time events. When gunmen stormed hotels and other sites in Mumbai (the former Bombay) in November, twitter.com was flooded with entries from users in the city who provided updates based on their observations on the ground.
Forbes.com called the news event “Twitter’s moment.” Users typed regular updates “with information or commentary on the crisis, turning a service that specializes in distributing short, personal updates to tight networks of friends and acquaintances into a way for people around the world to tune into personal, real-time accounts of the attacks.”34
Twitter also became a popular tool for reading real-time accounts of the 2008 political conventions, the Israeli invasion of Gaza that began in December 2008 and the January 2009 crash-landing of a US Airways passenger jet in the Hudson River.
Google bought a service in 2007 similar to Twitter called Jaiku, which allows users to view messages in chronological order across a timeline.
News Ranking Websites
Still another way of consuming news online, news-ranking websites, such as reddit.com and digg.com, grew in popularity as well in 2008. These news Web sites not only display news stories, but they also allow users to vote on their favorites and “push” the most popular news stories to the top of the communal Web page. Still, only a small share of Internet news consumers (5%) say they have ever used one of these sites to find news stories.
The relatively small group that uses these sites is disproportionately young and male. According to one survey, 11% of men younger than 30 who go online for news say they use news-ranking websites to find stories. Only 3% of the women in that age cohort did so, however, and only 4% of male online news consumers over 30 used them.35
E-mail
E-mail, among the oldest digital formats, also continued to grow in 2008 as a way for citizens to share news with friends. As of August 2008, the sizable majority of those who went online (68%) said they had been e-mailed a news story by a friend or associate, up from 61% in 2006, according to data from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.36 Fully 27% of Internet users said they received an e-mailed story in the past week. And nearly half of Americans (47%) said they themselves had sent a news story to someone, up nearly 18% from 2006, when the number was 40%. In addition, about 15% of Americans say they receive e-mail news alerts and summaries via their inboxes.
Customized News
By 2008, more Web news consumers than ever before were also taking advantage of online tools to tailor the news to their needs or tastes. Such customization tools allow people to set up Web pages with their favorite subjects and sources, or to receive e-mail alerts tailored to their interests.
By the summer of 2008, about half of online news users (44%) told a Pew survey that they were using some kind customization tool to acquire news.37
That might have taken a number of forms. For instance, the survey found that 22% of Americans say they have a customizable Web page that includes news items.38 These can be as simple as an AOL home page that is adjusted for the local weather forecast to a newspaper Web page programmed to highlight local news to a self-designed home page tailored to specific interests.
RSS
Many of those who customize their news use RSS, which stands for really simple syndication. The technology allows users to create their own news pages that automatically update such things as the score of favorite sports teams, news stories on topics or by certain sources, local traffic conditions, blogs and other material. According to the Pew survey in the summer of 2008, 7% of Americans said they used the technology.
The more time people spend with news online, the more likely they are to create such self-tailored page. About a third (36%) of Internet news users say they have a customizable Web page. But among the heaviest Web news consumers — those who go online for news daily — fully 44% say they have a customizable web page that incorporates news items.39
While RSS has continued to be used, other new options have become more prominent, and RSS, according to Media Analyst Rick Edmonds of the Poynter Institute, has not met “the big claims being made for it several years ago.”
Activities online
Beyond news, how do Americans divide the whole of their time on the Internet? The bulk of time (45%) was spent accessing content, be it news, music or visiting Wikipedia. They divide the rest of their time among four activities: conducting Internet searches (5%), making online purchases (13%), communicating (28%) and visiting social networking sites (9%).40
Although these figures suggest people spend a very small amount of their time searching (searches usually take seconds to execute), such searching is something virtually all Internet users do. As of November 2008, about 86% of Web users reported having ever used a search engine.41 And about half of Web users engage in search on a typical day.42
Conclusion
Was 2008 a breakthrough year for online traffic or a unique event? Certainly the trend lines continued — and at a faster pace. The answer should come soon enough as to whether the election was a transformative moment for the Internet or a one-time news event unusually well suited to the Web’s strengths.
Our sense is that we will look back on 2008 as a year that catapulted the Web audience to new, sustained levels. If so, it will have also deepened the paradox of the Internet. While it intensified interest in news, the shift to online news consumption also accelerated the dismantling of the economic foundation for gathering the news. The question going forward, then, becomes an even more desperate effort to monetize that Web audience.
Intro | Content Analysis | Audience | Economics | News Investment | Ownership | Charts & Tables |
