Valleywag
There are many, many ways to count Web audiences. Pageviews and time spent are the two most commonly watched metrics, and they’re reasonably easy to understand. Now Nielsen says it wants to use “sessions per person per month” to tally up visitors to popular news sites. Matt Drudge got ahold of the latest rankings and linked them prominently on his Drudge Report — no surprise, since he dominates the rankings. Nielsen puts Drudge Report at 19.9 sessions per person in February — roughly once per weekday. Liberal community news site DailyKos comes up second with 8.9 sessions per person. Get the rest of the list after the jump.
Top 30 Online Current Events & Global News Destinations, ranked by Sessions per Person
Brand or channel; sessions per person; unique audience (000)
1. drudgereport.com; 19.9; 3,445
2. Daily Kos^; 8.9; 1,204
3. Fox News Digital Network; 8.3; 10,177
4. CNN Digital Network; 7.9; 37,181
5. AOL News; 7.7; 21,119
6. Yahoo! News; 7.4; 35,274
7. MSNBC Digital Network; 6.4; 34,013
8. ksl.com^; 6.0; 796
9. Breitbart.com; 5.3; 2,674
10. Google News; 5.3; 12,050
11. Gannett Newspapers and Newspaper Division; 5.1; 13,998
12. NYTimes.com; 4.9; 18,975
13. Netscape; 4.8; 2,709
14. Townhall.com; 4.7; 1,152
15. Media General Newspapers; 4.6; 1,761
16. GTGI Network 4.5; 1,345
17. Star Tribune; 4.3; 2,108
18. TWC News Websites; 4.1; 840
19. NewsMax.com; 4.0; 4,054
20. Zwire^; 3.9; 1,089
21. Cox Newspapers; 3.9; 5,197
22. washingtonpost.com; 3.8; 10,441
23. Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; 3.8; 1,259
24. The Buffalo News^; 3.7; 502
25. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 3.6; 1,472
26. MediaNews Group Newspapers; 3.5; 5,850
27. USATODAY.com; 3.5; 10,571
28. WorldNow 3.5; 10,588
29. IB Websites; 3.4; 7,565
30. St. Louis Post Dispatch^; 3.4; 1,022
^ Indicates Home and Work audience duplication projections did not meet minimum sample size standards. Combined home and work audience estimates for these sites may exhibit increased variability month-to-month as a result.
This data, also from Nielsen Online, shows the monthly traffic and other data for newspaper-based Web sites for February 2008:
66,456,096 - monthly unique audience for newspaper sites, an increase of 13.2 percent (year over year)
41 percent - active reach, an increase of 9.4 percent (year over year)
3,064,613,644 - total page views on newspaper sites, an increase of 8.5 percent (year over year)
46.05 - page views per person
Comments
Really these things should be placed in a few categories. Some are community sites allowing and even encouraging people to sign in and interact. Some are actual news gathering organizations doing the hard part of news gathering, some are mostly aggregators providing links ad news summaries.
Drudge is fairly unique in that it is put together by hand, though no doubt he relies on aggregators of his own. It's almost all links. No story summaries or unique content of any kind (except very rarely). There is no way to sign up for the site, nor can you post a message in any way and there is no RSS feed for the site except those put together by third parties. If you use such a feed you are clicking directly through to the news source without even visiting the Drudge site, and I'm quite sure those don't get counted.
Anyway I think there was just a posting recently that put some other news site ahead of Drudge. Interesting how divergent two different studies can be in a single week.
The more things change the more they stay the same, and in the age of electronic publishing the game is still to try and convince advertisers that your place is the best place to place his ad, even if somehow the number can never quite be verified. Not much different than throwing the unsold copies in the nearest dumpster after all.
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