Legal Research

Pew State of the News Media 2010

By admin

Just a head?s up that the Pew Research Center?s Project for Excellence in Journalism has done some polling about consumer attitudes about paying for news online ? and found that the prospects are pretty grim for news organizations to convince consumers to pay for something that they now get for free.

The Pew project has done some analysis of the polls and you can read it here: Online economics and consumer attitudes
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/The-economics-of-online-news.aspx?r=1.

There is also some very important and interesting new analysis in the PEJ report based on Nielsen Netratings data about traffic to news sites: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2010/specialreports_nielsen.php.
Some soundbites:

?When it comes to online news, while it is a long tail world, with thousands of sites offering news, the top websites dominate traffic. Across the full roster Nielsen examines ? the entire unfiltered list of 4,600 news and information websites ? the top 7% collect 80% of the overall traffic.?

?Among news sites that attract 500,000 monthly visitors or more, the top 10% of the most popular sites attract half the traffic.?

?Legacy media still make up the majority of the most trafficked destinations (by Unique Audience),although newly created websites are joining the list each year. Of the top 199 sites in our analysis, 67% are from legacy media, and they account for 66% of the traffic.?

?Aggregators make up 27% of the top news websites and a few are among the most popular of all.?

?The data also suggest that contrary to what some believe, specialty sites like those covering health care or science do not draw an especially loyal audience.?

?Two political sites, Daily Kos and Drudge Report, stand out with vastly higher numbers than the average site. Daily Kos averages 48 minutes per person per month and the Drudge Report nearly an hour, five times the average news site.?

Libraries, without doubt, depend on publishers and authors for much of our stock in trade. As the business models of newspapers change, we much be cognizant of the adaptations we might have to consider.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on March 17, 2010 (boomark / email).