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Celeb and entertainment searches dominate Google News
March 26, 2009
Last week we revealed that Twitter had overtaken Google News in the UK. However, although everyone’s favourite micro-blogging service receives more UK Internet visits, Google News remains the greater source of traffic for News and Media websites. As the chart below illustrates, in February Google News UK sent five times more traffic to News and Media websites than Twitter.
Given the importance of Google News, we decided to do some analysis the topics that people are searching for on the service. For the 12 weeks ending 21/03/09, two-thirds of Google News UK’s traffic came from search engines – primarily Google, as you would expect. We tracked 261,000 distinct search terms that sent traffic to the site over the period, and surprisingly just 2.1% of all search traffic came from Google branded search terms. The term ‘jade goody’ accounted for 2.6% of Google News UK’s traffic, more than all of the branded terms combined.
The top 300 generic search terms sending traffic to Google News over the last 12 weeks accounted for a quarter of all the site’s search traffic. Categorizing these terms based on topic we produced the following chart, which illustrates the most popular content areas that are sending search traffic to Google News UK.
As you can see, 24.1% of searches sending traffic to Google News UK for the 12 weeks ending 21/03/09 were Celebrity related, with Jade Goodie, Natasha Richardson and Celebrity Big Brother the most popular topics. Once more general Film, TV and Music searches are added in, just over a half of all searches sending traffic to the site were Entertainment / Celebrity related.
The second biggest category was Sport, which accounted for 17.5% of all search terms sending traffic to Google News UK. All of the top 10 Sport search terms were football related, with team names and players that were talked about during the transfer window (e.g. Arsenal’s Andrei Arshavin) featuring highly.
Perhaps surprisingly, a minority of searches sending traffic to Google News UK were related to ‘serious’ news topics. Business and Technology searches were the most popular, with the former category dominated by company names and the latter containing a mixture of social networking (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc) and gadget (e.g. ‘ps3’, ‘iphone’, ‘windows 7’) terms.
Of the more general news searches, the novelty of January and February’s snow storms contributed to the relatively high number of Weather searches. The World News category was a combination of searches for Barack Obama and country names (e.g. Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Gaza, India, Iran, etc.). The UK News searches were more of a mixed bag – here are the top 10 for 12 week ending 21/03/09:
1. crufts
2. transport for london
3. bnp
4. crufts 2009
5. madeleine mccann
6. dogs
7. david cameron
8. 1911 census
9. 13 year old dad
10. cannabis
Update (27/03/09)
I wanted to address Shafqat’s question in the comments box below: “Are you saying that only 0.92% of News & Media website's referral traffic comes from Google News?”
The simple answer to question is “yes”, as illustrated in the chart below. During February, websites in our News and Media category received 0.92% of their UK traffic from Google News UK. By way of comparison, 21.3% of their traffic came from google.co.uk, 3.6% from google.com, 2.5% from yahoo.co.uk and 1.3% from Google UK Image Search.
However, our News and Media parent category is broad church, and much of the content couldn’t really be described as news in the traditional sense. For example, the top site is the BBC Homepage, and the category also includes a lot of weather sites. A more representative category is News and Media – Print, which is dominated by newspaper websites. The February clickstream table for that category is illustrated below.
Here you can see that Google New is a more significant source of traffic for News and Media – Print websites. It ranks 7th rather than 14th, and accounts for almost twice as much traffic than for the News and Media category overall. However you can also see Google News is still dwarfed by Google Search and Image Search. Perhaps even more significantly, the Guardian actually sends more traffic to other News and Media – Print websites than Google News in the UK. This highlights the significance of people browsing for their news. In February, 1 in every 7 visits to a News and Media – Print website came from another News and Media – Print website.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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In Categories Celebrities | Football | Gadgets | Google | Movies | Music | News and Media | Politics | Search | Sport | TV | Twitter | Weather
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Comments
Good question, Shafqat. I've updated the post to proveide the answer above.
Thanks, Robin
Posted by Robin Goad | March 27, 2009 11:05 AM
Wow, I've been looking for this kind of data for a long time. As we geeks say, Hitwise FTW! I have a few interesting conclusions to draw from the updated data, so will follow up with a blog post.
Thanks for the quick response and updating your post. Very impressive!
Posted by Shafqat | March 27, 2009 11:14 AM
Can you quantify the percentage of people that arrive at GNews UK and them go to "News and Media category" and "News and Media – Print"?
Can we have a look at GNews UK dowstream chart?
Here in O Dia (a newspaper in Rio, Brazil) we got 27% from our traffic from Google, but the traffic from GNews.br is almost null. Right now is null, as we just release a new design and yet have to submit a brand new sitemap for GNews ... which your awesome post remember me that I must do.
Thanks for sharing, Sir.
Best regards from Brazil.
Victor
Posted by Javoski | March 27, 2009 05:13 PM
Hi Victor,
During February, 55.5% of Google News UK's downstream traffic went to News and Media sites. Of that, the majority (67.7%) went to News and Media - Print websites.
Thanks, Robin
PS - your's was the 500th comment on my blog since it stated c18 months ago!
Posted by Robin Goad | March 27, 2009 06:15 PM
That rises another question, if you dont mind: where did the other 44,5% go?
Is people satisfied with scanning the headlines, 1st sentences and news categories ... and them heading to mail, social networks?
Another angle: is Google News UK aggregating sites that are not media related nor have news as primary focus?
I navigate a couple minutes there and found some domains that - I guess - are not included in your "News and Media category".
For example
http://www.recruiter.co.uk
http://www.nursinginpractice.com
http://www.hortweek.com/
http://www.localgov.co.uk
http://www.personneltoday.com
http://www.diyweek.net
http://www.heatingandventilating.net
At first sight they are not news related at all but are backed by some "niche media organizations", as hortweek has a print edition since 1840 and heatingandventilating.net sells ads!
Do Hitwise have some category related to "niche media"?
Can you point to where the other 44,5% go?
Thanks a lot for your attention.
I hope the 500th commentary brings luck to me and you. I am sure the knowledge you´re sharing will!
Posted by Javoski | March 27, 2009 07:55 PM
Interesting analysis, but I'm a bit confused. Are you saying that only 0.92% of News & Media website's referral traffic comes from Google News? That's seems ridiculously low to me.
Would love to see a breakdown of where a News & Media website get's it's traffic from. If its not Google News, or Twitter, is it Google? How much of it is from the search engine? How much of it is direct? etc.
Given the "death of newspapers" meme going around the web, this would certainly be very interesting information.
Posted by Shafqat | March 27, 2009 09:59 AM