Hitwise: News Sites Need Search Engines and Aggregators
It's no secret that the Associated Press and Google News aren't exactly getting along right now. According to the AP, Google News and other content aggregators often come too close to violating the principles of fair use. Most people, however, would argue that these aggregators actually bring more traffic to newspaper websites, and according to the latest data from Hitwise, this is exactly the case.
Search traffic, according to Hitwise, is the largest driver of traffic to sites in the company's 'News & Media' category (21.6%). Portal frontpages like My Yahoo and My MSN currently drive about 13% of traffic to these sites, and social networking services and forums drive about 4.9%.
Blogs and personal websites are only responsible for a very small 1.5% of all traffic.
There is also a lot of traffic that is directly shared between news sites. Outbound traffic from other news sites accounts for just as many visits as traffic from search engines (21.6%).
According to Hitwise, the Drudge Report is the largest single source of visitors to news and media sites. Google News (1.5%), CNN.com (1.4%) and Yahoo! News (0.8%) also drive relatively large amounts of traffic, but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.
The Associated Press and the traditional newspaper business are obviously under a lot of stress right now (and in many ways, Craigslist is the real culprit here - not Google News and portals), but a large part of traffic to news sites is driven by portal sites. We can't blame the AP for trying to protect its intellectual property rights, but, as Google's Eric Schmidt described it, "these are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more."
Image credit: Flickr user Matt Callow
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
But I think driving the most traffic to news sites doesn't mean that they aren't contributing to overall reading of newspapers (print or web versions). Also, search and aggregators force previously local papers to have to compete nationally (to an extent even globally). The ones that show up in search results or aggregators are big winners. But the rest are ignored.
The paper part of the newspaper is dead … Get over it.
The only thing that will remain is going to be vanity presses like HP is proposing with their printing service [ http://magcloud.com/ ]
We didn’t fight for the rights of the buggy whip makers either … Suck it up.
Journalism however is definitely NOT DEAD.
It has been democratized, popularized, localized, opened up, opened on and opened for a new business model.
If you worked as an editor or for an editor, you are going to find that the average person hasn’t suddenly improved in spelling or grammar, logic or comprehension, ability to communicate or in layout skills.
We just have to find you a new way to get news that you write out there; .PDF files on your servers being distributed via RSS files that the Post Office has on their server and that gives access to the latest content for $ would go a long way towards granting you a new lease on life.
The RSS file can even contain the highlights and a little bit of text from the articles which are still on your servers.
Actually, you can extract the words from your articles, remove duplicates, sort them, and let Google be able to include or eliminate an article from a search, present the little highlight snatch of text to let potential readers determine if they are interested and then the post office can: 1) let subscribers access the article OR 2) charge for access to the article.
This last part, subscription fulfillment or piece-meal charging, would be done by the post office. Nobody has ever had a problem paying for a stamp or expected a letter to be delivered without a stamp.
Once the “news” becomes the “olds”, say after a week for most articles, let Gooogle have at the original that you can store in a separate server.
a) The transmission of the articles is almost free.
b) The distribution of the articles is almost free.
c) The access is cheap but NOT free and the post office sees to that and that helps them with their business model.
d) The post office send you a share of the money collected (and YOU KNOW HOW OFTEN AN ARTICLE IS FETCHED OFF OF YOUR SERVERS FROM A PARTICULAR IP ADDRESS.)
There is a business model that would work, it would
1) let new gathering organizations gather news,
2) let readers read,
3) let the post office disseminate and collect payments and disburse funds
but it is interesting that no single site really holds anything close to a monopoly here.