Minn. (MN)—The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ) less than a day ago released information on audience statistics from the Nielsen Company examining news behaviors by consumers, according to the website.
The areas of study focused on was how users get to the top news sites, how long do they interact with that website, how deep do they explore it and where do they go upon exiting the site. Much of our current news consumption has changed in light of the decline of advertising dollars around traditional media, which has led to a restructure and facelift of news.
According to the article Titled “Navigating News Online” the rise of “Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic. And far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites.”
The website that has become a pivotal player in the transformation of news is social media giant Facebook. The site with more than 500 million users worldwide is redefining news distribution and evolving rapidly as the go to news platform.
“For five of the news Websites studied here, Facebook ranked as the second or third most popular driver to their content. At the top was Huffingtonpost.com, which derived 8% of its traffic from links to Huffingtonpost.com content posted on Facebook,” according to the PEJ and Nielsen findings. “At the low end were AOLNews.com, MSNBC.com and the local aggregator Topix, which each derived 1% from Facebook. The New York Times was near the higher part of the spectrum; 6% of its traffic came from Facebook.”
With these recent statistical findings, perhaps the time is approaching on how to determine the economics of the news business. According to the PEJ these were the findings:
- Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on “casual users,” people who visit just a few times per month and spend only a few minutes at a site over that time span. USAToday.com was typical of most of these popular news sites: 85% of its users visited USAToday.com between one and three times per month. Three quarters came only once or twice. Time spent was even more daunting: When all the visits were added together, fully a third of users, 34%, spent between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month.[1] Even if, as some suggest, online data tend to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and undercounting repeat visits, casual users till would be the largest single group.
- There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly, from as high as 18% (at CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at BingNews.com).
- Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.
- Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.
- When it comes to the age, news consumers to the top news websites are on par with Internet users overall. This stands apart from news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to skew older, and may bode well for the industry.
Given these complex stats it’s certain that we a changing economy, the rise of social media networking the old news cycle will never return.
An article published by the New York Times titled “For Journalists, a Call to Rethink Their Online Models” takes into account a survey conducted Columbia University. The article asserts some key points as to why Journalist failed to grasp and adapt to the digital news era.
“It also recommends that journalists “gain a fuller appreciation for how advertisers now reach their customers via social media, new-media ads and search engine optimization,” and that larger news organizations should consider creating or re-creating separate digital staffs, “particularly on the business side.”
It’s a 139 page report that will be released later today and it outlines recommendations for traditional media to compete more effectively for news dissemination.
Figuring out how to monetize news, how it wraps around social media forces, and accounting smartphone innovation the discussion continues to baffle experts in a multitude of industries. The takeaway here is there is a discussion around the new face of journalism and how it will evolve in the very near future.
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