The Drudge Report, the number one news aggregator for decades, drives more news to top news websites than social media websites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Drudge refers a large audience to Yahoo! News, The New York Times, Fox News, the Washington Post and the New York Post.
Five of the top 21 news sites received more than 10% of their audience for the Drudge Report. Referrals from Twitter were reported to be negligible — 4% at the most. Facebook is reported to be growing fast as a referral source. google is still the primary referral source.
Most viewers of news websites are reported to be casual users that visit only a few times per month and only spend minutes on the website, which means the “Bounce” is high.
The study examined 25 worldwide news websites that are popular in the United States
TOP NEWS WEBSITES by research firms Nielsen (US), comScore (blog), Hitwise
The full list of the top 25 news websites in 2010 compiled by journalism.org :
news.yahoo.com
CNN.com
msnbc.msn.com
AOL News — aol.com
New York Times
Tribune Newspapers | tribune.com
huffingtonpost.com
abcnews.go.com
usatoday.com
washingtonpost.com
Advance Internet
cbsnews.com
Wall Street Journal online.wsj.com
MailOnline.com
The McClatchy Company | Newspapers
Hearst Newspapers | Newspapers
examiner.com
medianewsgroup.com | Newspapers
nydailynews.com
BBC News — bbc.co.uk/news
FoxNews.com
Gaurdian UK — gaurdian.co.uk
Topix.com
Belo | Companies by region
Boston.com
SOURCE:
Journalism.org NAVIGATING NEWS ONLINE: WHERE PEOPLE GO, HOW THEY GET THERE AND WHAT LURES THEM AWAY