CNN.com tops MSNBC.com in October stats

Cory Bergman November 17th, 2006

It’s been quite some time since CNN.com beat MSNBC.com in the monthly Nielsen-Netratings stats. Here are the top five news sites in unique users for October:

1. Yahoo! News, 29,113,000
2. CNN.com, 27,570,000
3. MSNBC.com, 26,548,000
4. AOL News, 16,836,000
5. NYTimes.com, 12,936,000

(See the top 20 here.) And ABCNews.com says page views jumped 77 percent in October, thanks primarily to breaking the Mark Foley story. See release on that below…

PRESS RELEASE — ABCNEWS.com hit a five year high in October with more than 138 million page views, showing a 77% increase from October 2005, according to an internal measurement tool. ABC News’ Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross’ reporting on the Mark Foley/congressional page scandal, a story that he broke online, was a key driver to the site’s traffic. The Investigative Unit’s page, including “The Blotter,” garnered an all-time monthly high in page views, since its launch in late April. October’s traffic for the Investigative Unit’s content increased more than five times from the previous monthly average.

According to the Nielsen Net Ratings for the month of October 2006, ABC News Digital continued to climb in the top ten rankings, moving to 7th to place among general news sites – up two places from September 2006. The October ranking is an all time record high for ABC News Digital.*

With increasing rank, unique visitors and page views, ABC News Digital showed strong growth across every measure for the month. Compared to the same time last year, ABC News Digital increased unique visitors by 33%, achieving the highest growth in the top ten general news sites. The site garnered a six percent increase month-to-month.

ABC News Now has also seen strong success, most recently during the 2006 Election. The 24-hour digital network’s election coverage, which was also streamed live across the web and on mobile devices, delivered 700,000 live streams during Election Day and the day after.

*Data since Nielsen began reporting ABC News Digital separately from ABC Digital in October 2003.