With media brands increasingly looking to upgrade their online presence, a new study provides illuminating new information on how consumers use media sites, how they get there and where they go when they leave.
Survey by: Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
Methodology: Analysis of Nielsen Netview data from September 2010
Key findings:
• Even major online news brands such as USAToday.com and NewYorkTimes.com are heavily populated by “Casual Users” – people who visit only a few times a month and spend only a few minutes on the site over that span. An estimated 75% of the leading media sites’ users visit only once or twice a month. One third of monthly visitors, 34%, spend between just one and five minutes on a paper’s website.
• Sites typically possess a small core of loyal and frequent visitors known as “Power Users.” These people return to a given site at least 10 times per month, and collectively spend more than an hour there. Among the top 25 newspaper sites, however, Power Users comprise an average of just 7% of total users.
• Google remains the primary entry point for news sites, accounting for an average of 30% of traffic to the top news sites.
• Social media, particularly Facebook, is emerging as a powerful news referral source. For instance, 8% of HuffingtonPost.com’s visitors arrive via Facebook. In addition, when users leave a site, “Share” tools that appear alongside many news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.
• Little news site traffic arrives via Twitter. Of the top 21 sites for which there were data, Twitter showed up as referring links to just nine. For all but one of those nine, Twitter sent only about 1% of total traffic.
• In assessing “departures” from media sites – where people go when they click out of a site – the study found that not a single consumer product web site appeared in the mix of destination sites from news sites. In other words, in no case did five people click on the same ad on a news site in the months studied. This reinforces industry measurement of click-through rates as well as a PEJ survey from 2010 which found that 79% of people surveyed said they never clicked on an ad on a news website.
For more information on the PEJ study click here (http://www.journalism.org/analysis_report/navigating_news_online)
