Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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February 27, 2007
Fastest Growing News & Media Websites: Digg.com & Print - News & Media Post 1 of 3
In a series of three three posts, I will present some of the key findings from our forthcoming Hitwise UK Online News and Media report (request copy of report here). This first post will discuss the growth in visits to the category and list the fastest growing websites. The next two posts will be about Competition 2.0 and Blogs from Mainstream Media.
The News and Media parent category experienced 28% year on year growth in market share of UK internet visits in January. IT media was the fastest growing sub-category, up 57% year on year in January.
A list of the ten fastest growing News and Media websites (among the top 100 in January) is included below. Digg.com was the fastest growing website year on year in January among the top 100 News and Media websites, with its market share of UK internet visits up more than 5-fold. Digg.com was the #1 IT Media website in January 2007 and the #32 ranked News and Media website. Digg's growth is being fuelled by interest in video sharing and games, with 23% of downstream visits from Digg.com going to websites in the Entertainment industry.
Yesterday's announcement that the Financial Times has seen a 30% increase in online sales is good news for print media brands. I agree with the sentiments of PR blogger that online doesn't kill print media brands, and our data backs that up. Print media websites were among the fastest growing categories last year, keeping pace with the News and Media parent category with visits up 28% year on year in January. However, challenging times lie ahead as more and more consumers turn to nimble social media websites for news and analysis as we'll explore in the next post in this series on Competition 2.0.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 02:09 PM
Posted to News and Media
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Comments
Er -that table isn't very well formatted -what's in the third column?
Posted by: Jim at February 28, 2007 02:55 AM
Jim, Thanks for pointing that out. The table should be clearer now. I was viewing the post on a wide screen, but you are right, the last column was cut off for most screens.
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at February 28, 2007 03:23 AM
Way to go digg!
Posted by: Whytey at February 28, 2007 05:22 AM
how do you measure downstream visits from digg? 23% to entertainment sites sounds very high considering most stories are tech or science related...
Posted by: Joff at February 28, 2007 06:23 AM
Joff, Thanks for your comment. We collect our data through partnerships with ISPs. From the ISP data we are able to see the immediate upstream and downstream sites (or the site visited immediately before and after) for websites or industries. All of the data is anomised and aggregated and it allows us to report the percentage of visitors that went to a particular website or industry.
You are right, the percentage of traffic going to the Entertainment category is high. News and Media websites were getting more traffic from Digg than Entertainment sites until the summer. Since then, Entertainment has continued to grow. Last week, 22.31% of downstream UK visits from Digg went to a website in the Entertainment category, 12.61% went to a website in the News and Media category.
Seems to be mostly about video sharing websites, in particular YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe, and game websites, such as Kotaku.
We also see a significant proportion of Digg's traffic going to Blogs. Last week, 10.41% of Digg's UK downstream visits went to a Blog website.
Hope that clarifies. Let me know if you need anything else.
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at February 28, 2007 07:16 AM
Thank you..for this info
Posted by: smart at February 28, 2007 11:06 AM
How do you gather all this downstream data?
Posted by: Phill Midwinter at March 1, 2007 12:23 AM
Phill,
As mentioned above, we collect our data through partnerships with ISPs. From the ISP data we are able to see the immediate upstream and downstream sites (or the site visited immediately before and after) for websites or industries. All of the data is anomised and aggregated and it allows us to report the percentage of visitors that went to a particular website or industry.
If you need more detail, let me know.
Thanks, Heather
Posted by: Heather Hopkins at March 1, 2007 02:57 AM
