Thrust and Parry

Where does your online news come from?

Interesting to note, The Sun would have received a little over 2% of the traffic Yahoo did on that day, which while initially seeming tiny is actually a rollicking success when you think it through.

futurejournalismproject:

Where We Got Our News: Bin Laden Death Announcement.

Forbes’ Eric Savitz has the breakdown on the numbers for the Web’s largest news day in the past three years.

Yahoo lead all news sources with 26,783,058 site visits while MSNBC saw a 257% traffic spike from the previous Monday.

Reuters’ Felix Salmons analyzes the numbers as well, writing:

At the same time, however, it’s only reasonable to assume that a significant proportion of the online population really does go straight to Yahoo News when something’s breaking. Note too the fact that four of the top six sites in the list are the online arms of TV networks, and that all of the top seven sites are either TV networks or web-native sites.

The lesson is clear: when big news breaks, people flock to TV. And when they’re online, they still flock to TV, or else they go to the main sites they think of for providing good fast web-native news. Other news sites, like NYT and WaPo, are lucky just to break into the top ten. They’re very good at what they do. But the broad population still doesn’t think of them as being real-time in the way that TV and the web are.

Analytics Source: Experian Hitwise.

Update: To clarify — and in response to Peter’s astute observation — this shows how the ten most visited sites stack up against each other.

(Source: futurejournalismproject)