Press Release: Low Point for U.S. War Effort Was High Point for Web News Sites
Interesting research from Hitwise about how traffic patterns from leading news sites was impacted by the war on Iraq. The link above shows the complete press release here on MarketingFix (they emailed me, but I don't see the release hosted on their site to link to yet).
Perhaps more interesting is Hitwise's claim, in the press release's lead, to be "the world's leading online competitive intelligence service." If you live in the U.S., you may be wondering why, then, you haven't heard of them. Well, they're out of Australia and already big with the Global 2000 in Europe and elsewhere, but they're just making their entrance into the U.S. market. I'm getting briefed by their CEO next week, so I'll have more details soon.
Full Press Release:
Low Point for U.S. War Effort Was High Point for Web News Sites
Fox News Capitalizes Most on War Traffic Spike, Hitwise Finds
NEW YORK - April 24, 2003 - Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service providing daily insights, reports that U.S. primary news sites* enjoyed their greatest spikes in Web traffic share on March 23rd, the day Arab TV station Al Jazeera aired footage of American bodies and prisoners of war. The two next biggest spikes for these sites came even earlier: on March 16th, the day President Bush emerged from the Azores summit reinforcing a deadline for the UN to endorse the use of force, and on March 19th, the day by which the President demanded Saddam Hussein leave Iraq.
Despite the huge spikes that U.S. primary news sites enjoyed during the war, nearly all of them failed to make permanent gains. By April 15, the day U.S. forces took Saddam Hussein's town of Tikrit, Web traffic shares of these sites had dropped to their pre-war levels. CNN.com, the unchallenged leader of the group, doubled its Web traffic share during the war to over .73% of US Internet user visits to all Internet sites but by April 15 had dropped below its March 1st level of .36%.
One site that did manage to make permanent gains was Fox News. Fox ended the war ranked 4th highest among U.S. primary news sites, having begun the war 7th among that group. Fox was also the most successful site on the metric of average-time-spent. Fox's users spent an average of nearly ten minutes per visit during the war, more than a minute longer than users on the next highest site. And at the end of the war, Fox was the only site whose users still spent appreciably more time per visit nearly a minute more than they did before the war started.
Illustrating the competitive state of online news, the site that sent Fox the most traffic during the war, and the site Fox sent the most traffic to, was CNN. Throughout the war, CNN held a steady 11% of both Fox's upstream and downstream traffic.
MSNBC, by the time the first shots were fired, had moved well ahead of The New York Times to become the clear #2 U.S. primary news site. By the end of the war, however, MSNBC had slipped back to its March 1st traffic share, neck-and-neck with the Times.
"Americans are clearly turning to the Web for breaking news in times of crisis," said Chris Maher, General Manager of Hitwise, North America. "The challenge for news sites, as they well know, is to turn event-driven visitors into everyday visitors."
About Hitwise
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service giving marketers, business strategists, agencies and financial analysts daily insights into the online competitive environment. Hitwise uses ISP user activity logs, opt-in mega panels and proprietary Internet trawling technologies to monitor the surfing habits of local Internet users, covering , work and educational usage. Monitoring the largest sample of Internet users of its kind in the world, Hitwise provides daily insights all companies need to make timely and effective business decisions.
Hitwise is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia and offers its service in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore and the USA.
