A May 16, 2007 release by the Media Post Center for Media Research shares highlights of a recent study by Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service. Hitwise's U.S. News & Media Report for April 2007 found several emerging trends in online news consumption.

Among them:

• The market share of visits to top 10 News and Media websites (Yahoo! News, The Weather Channel, CNN.com, MSNBC, Google News, Yahoo! Weather, Drudge Report, USA Today, New York Times, Fox News) declined by 3.8% from March 2006 to March 2007, indicating that news consumption is beginning to fragment as users expand their range of news sources to more news websites.
  
  
• Search engines, portal frontpages, and news aggregators were the leading sources of traffic to News and Media websites in March 2007, as opposed to intentional visits to News and Media website frontpages. The share of visits to News and Media websites from search engines increased over the past year, with traffic from Google increasing by 29.7% for Print websites and 35.9% for Broadcast websites.
  
  
• The share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment-Multimedia websites (YouTube, Yahoo! Video Streaming, MSN Video) increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007. Events involving user-generated video, such as the death of "Crocodile Hunter" Steve Irwin and the execution of Saddam Hussein, were big drivers of traffic from News and Media to Multimedia websites.
  
  
• Interest in online celebrity gossip news increased substantially in the past year. The market share of visits to top 20 celebrity blogs more than doubled from March 2006 to March 2007. Gossip events involving Britney Spears and Anna Nicole Smith were big drivers of traffic to celebrity gossip sites.
  
  
• Local news consumption is evolving thanks to Topix, a local news aggregator and community website. Topix is a privately held company with investment from Gannett Co., Inc., The McClatchy Company, and Tribune Company. Topix's market share increased by 81% from March 2006 to March 2007, and it showed above average representation from users in rural states such as Kentucky and South Dakota.

• Digg is a social news website that has become popular among young, tech-focused users. The bulk of its downstream traffic went to Entertainment, News and Media, and Blog websites in March 2007, but it doesn't yet serve as a significant source of traffic to the News and Media industry.

Click here to register on the Hitwise website for the April 2007 U.S. News & Media Report. After you register on the Hitwise site you'll receive an email with a link to the report in Adobe Acrobat format.

NOTE: Main page photo by, and used with permission of, Bazil Raubach.SXC.