Users choose multi-media over news content

News and media websites have another reason to be nervous about the ever-changing Internet: according to a new study from Hitwise, nearly 200% of past traffic has left news and media sites in favor of newer multi-media sites.

by Kristina Knight

According to the Hitwise US News and Media Report, between April 2006 and May 2007, traffic increased at multi-media sites by 196%. Much of that traffic was because of a decrease in traffic to news and media content sites.

LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise and author of the report said, search engines helped multi-media sites increase their traffic in the last year. "Search engines were more likely to be the first step for Internet users in their search for information about breaking events, and search engine results from news video services, video sites like YouTube, and blogs were more likely to contain the information they sought, thus hastening the growth of non-traditional news sources."

Google, in fact, sent 29% more traffic to news and information sites in March 2007 than in March 2006. Still, the report indicates that the market share for news and information sites decreased by 3.8% YOY.

News aggregators such as Topix, however, increased their market share. According to the report, there was an 81% growth YOY for news aggregators. Rural areas, especially, are more prone to use aggregators as their main source of information.