Search drives nearly quarter of newspaper visits

Cory Bergman May 3rd, 2007

Hitwise reports that nearly 25 percent of visits to newspaper sites were referred by search engines. From March to March, print sites saw a 29.7 percent increase in traffic generated by Google while broadcast media experienced a 35.9 percent rise. Hitwise also said that news consumption is beginning to fragment: the share of visits to the top 10 news sites declined 3.8 percent from November to March while traffic to gossip blogs is increasing rapidly. “Search engines were more likely to be the first step for Internet users in their search for information about breaking events, and search engine results from news video services, video sites like YouTube, and blogs were more likely to contain the information they sought, thus hastening the growth of nontraditional news sources,” said LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise and author of the report. This underlines the urgency for TV sites to carefully optimize search keywords as well as write story headlines that resonate in a search world.