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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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The role of news aggregators in the UK

October 02, 2008

News aggregators come in many shapes and sizes, ranging from straight forward aggregators (e.g. Google News) to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Stumble Upon and Delicious. When creating a custom category of the top sites in the UK we used a pretty fluid definition. As you can from the table below, which lists the top 10 most visited sites during August, we’ve included RSS readers and Twitter (as we pointed out recently, the micro-blogging service sends a significant amount of its traffic to mainstream media sites).

Google News UK is the most visited news aggregator site, but it doesn’t dominate the market. NewsNow receives over a fifth of all visits to the category, while Stumble Upon and Digg each manage over 10%. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet traffic to the overall category has more than doubled over the last couple of years.

News aggregators sent 27.2% of their traffic to News and Media sites during August. Print media websites (i.e. newspapers and magazines) received over two thirds of this traffic, with IT Media websites and Community Directories and Guides websites, each receiving 5%. Most of the remaining News and Media traffic went to BBC sites, and BBC News is currently the second most visited downstream site from the news aggregators after Google UK. Outside of traditional media sites, 7.1% of traffic from the category goes to social networks, while a further 4.2% goes to blogs.

Looking at the amount of upstream traffic each sector receives from news aggregators allows us to see how reliant they are on the category. Surprisingly none receives more than 4% of its traffic from news aggregators, although in each case the level has increased over the last two years. News and Media – Print is the most reliant, followed by Blogs and Personal Websites, which recently overtook IT Media. Social networks are least reliant on the sector, with news aggregators accounting for less than one in every 350 visits.

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In Categories BBC | Blogs | Google | News and Media | Social networks

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