A study by Hitwise shows that Web visitors are trending away from traditional online news and media sources and are moving toward social media, local news and blog sites. Other studies have confirmed that as well, as growth has definitely slowed down for the traditional media sites.
Hitwise said that the share of traffic that is leaving traditional sites for other sites has increased by 196 percent from April of 2006 through April of 2007.
LeeAnn Prescott, director of research at Hitwise and author of the report, said "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 i
nformation they sought, thus hastening the growth of non-traditional news sources."
For the top 10 News and Media Web sites, traffic dropped by close to 4 percent from March of 2006 to March of 2007; showing that the continuing fragmentation of the market is increasing.
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