Australians Opting to Get Their News Online

As somebody who spends a fair bit of time online I am not in the least bit surprised about some recent statistics that have been released by a leading online competitive intelligence service - Hitwise. Hitwise has announced that News and Media - Print Web sites have experienced a solid 17.6% increase market share of visitors between April 2007 and April 2008.

The leading News and Media websites through to April 2008 were the Sydney Morning Herald (14.25%), The Age (10.39%), The Herald Sun (5.81%), The Daily Telegraph (3.62%), and The Australian (3.4%). It is interesting to note that the leading traffic driver to these websites was Google (13.34%) followed by nine MSN (3.11%). This is a really strong indication that a large majority of Web site users rely heavily on search engines as their news source.

Another interesting statistic coming out of the Hitwise report was the increase in growth of Web site traffic that is being referred from the social networking sites of Facebook and Digg to these News and Media portals.

I think that it further strong evidence at the demise of the traditional newspaper. Personally I still like to look at the newspaper but I find that the information that I’m reading is becoming very quickly outdated in comparison to the speed at which a News and media Web site can publish news stories.