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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Yahoo!, Google and MSN: news services compared
October 20, 2008
After we published our blog post on news aggregators last month, one commenter asked why we hadn’t included Yahoo! News? I answered that Yahoo’s News service is different from Google’s because is contains its own content, rather than links to external sources. However, although they take different approaches content, there is no doubt that the Google and Yahoo! services are competitive. I promised to post some analysis comparing the two, o here it is - plus I’ve included MSN as a bonus.
The chart below illustrates traffic to Yahoo! News UK, Google News UK and MSN News UK over the last three years. While Google has the most consistent levels of traffic, Yahoo! has increased its market share considerably this year following a slump, and is now the most popular of the three. In fact, all three services have seen increases in traffic recently, thanks in part to the turbulent financial markets.
Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft / MSN are all significant sources of traffic for many other websites, but how much do their news sites rely on traffic from their own properties? In each case the answer is: a lot. Yahoo! News UK is the most reliant on its own properties, which accounted for 84.6% of its upstream traffic during September. At 81.6% the number was similar for MSN, but Google came in noticeably lower at 67.2%. The chart below illustrates why this difference occurred: all of the sites are similarly reliant on their search properties, but Google News UK receives less traffic from its email properties and other content sites.
The main reason email is so unimportant for Google is that people do not email links to Google News, they email a link to the original story instead. Looking at the downstream traffic from the three services (this time to all sites not just their own) you can see that the pattern is repeated: 18.9% of people visiting Yahoo News UK go to an email service afterwards, compared to just 1.7% of Google News UK visitors.
Aside from the relative importance of email, the chart above also shows that social networks are important downstream websites for MSN and Yahoo!, although not for Google. However, the clearest difference is in the amount of traffic sent to other news and media sites. Google News UK sends 54.25 of its traffic to our News and Media category, but then that is its purpose. The figures are 8.9% and 8.6% for Yahoo! and MSN respectively, although that should be considered traffic leakage rather than a positive thing. You can also see that those two sites send more traffic to search engines, but that should be expected. Yahoo! and MSN News represent the end of user journey, whereas Google News is more like the mid point.
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:30 PM
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In Categories Email | Google | News and Media
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