Study Finds 'Casual' Users Make Up Bulk of News Consumers

Navigating News Online: Where People Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away

May 9, 2011- Much of journalism's future depends on understanding the ways that people navigate the digital news environment-the behavior of what might be called the new news consumer.

A report by Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism examines this behavior in-depth at the most popular 25 news sites and finds several, distinct groups of news consumers, suggesting organizations need layered and complex strategies to serve and generate revenue from each one.

Casual users make up the majority of visitors-on average 77% of the traffic to the top 25 news sites visit just once or twice a month. But most sites also have a smaller, more loyal group of what might be called "power users," who visit news sites 10 times or more per month and spend more than an hour there during that time.

The study also finds that users get to their news in a variety of ways. Search engines account, on average, for 30% of the traffic to these sites, with Google as the primary entry point. But social media sites, Facebook in particular, are becoming increasingly important. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second- or third-most important driver of traffic.

"Understanding not only what kinds of content users want to consume but also what they are likely to share may be a key to how stories are put together and how revenue strategies are structured," says PEJ Deputy Director Amy Mitchell.

The analysis is based on an in-depth study of nine months of consumer data from the Nielsen Company, spanning the first three quarters of 2010. The report examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States and builds off the Project for Excellence in Journalism's 2010 Netview analysis of the top roughly 200 news sites in the United States.

Among the findings:

· Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on casual users. 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. Even if, as some suggest, online data tends to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and undercounting repeat visits, casual users would be the largest single group.

· CNN.com commands the greatest percent of power users. Power users make up an average of 7% of the audience, but that figure ranged quite a bit. On CNN.com, nearly one-in-five visitors is a power user (18% of visitors returned more than 10 times per month and 17% spent over an hour). Fox News follows with 16% visiting more than 10 times per month and 17% spending more than an hour. But these are among a select few. Indeed the six news sites that have double-digit power users ranked in the top eight news sites in popularity-suggesting that a large base of power users is one key to success.

· Google drives most users. In the 40% of traffic that comes to top news sites from outside referrals, one player emerges as more important than all others. Together Google Search and to a lesser extent Google News remain the biggest single driver of traffic to top news sites. Indeed, it was the lead referring site for 17 of these major news sites, and the second-ranked referring site for the other four.

Twitter is not yet a big player in sharing news. Despite its growth and the amount of attention it receives, the micro-blogging service Twitter appears, at this point, to play a relatively small role in sharing of links to news sources. Of the top 21 sites for which there was data, Twitter showed up as referring links to just nine. And for all but one of those nine, Twitter sent only about 1% of total traffic.
Drudge report is small operation with a big influence. Before Google or Facebook, an early major driver of internet traffic was The Drudge Report. Two decades later, Drudge is still a small scale operation that is an influential driver of traffic to top news sites. It ranked as a driver of traffic to all but six of the top sites studied, and, more striking, it ranked second or third in more than half (12), outpacing Facebook.
· The addition of social networking "share" tools seems to have paid off. When users leave a news sites, Facebook shows up among the top destinations for every site studied. So do sharing tool widgets like Addthis.com, which allow users to share a story across a wide range of social network pages. Although these sharing tools may take a consumer away from the news site, their usage can create a multiplier effect by promoting the content more broadly.

This study was designed and produced by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan and nonpolitical fact tank headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Read the complete study.