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Entertainment News Surges Online
Online news sites which focus on entertainment content and celebrity gossip are attracting more and more users in the US, particularly during office hours.
Digital media monitors comScore announced that entertainment news sites attracted a seven per cent increase in visitors in May 2009 compared with May last year. A total of 54.9 million Americans logged on to find their latest snippet of entertainment information either from dedicated news sites or entertainment blogs online.
Americans spent some 15 million hours in May looking at entertainment news sites, with a little less than half that time being spent whilst employees were at work. Executive vice president at comScore, Jack Flanagan commented: “Americans are feeding their hunger for celebrity gossip by ‘snacking’ on these news updates throughout the workday. In fact, nearly half of all time spent on entertainment news sites comes from work computers.”
Top of the news delivery sites was Yahoo!’s celebrity site omg! which almost doubled its user base from last year to 21 million visitors. TMZ came second overall, but led the video poll with over 10 million videos viewed by some 2 million users.
Part of the reason why online news content has become increasingly popular is the immediacy with which it can be delivered. With the sad announcement of Michael Jackson’s death in Los Angeles a week ago today, it took TMZ just twenty minutes to post the first announcement of the King of Pop’s death, whilst other news sources were scrambling to confirm the hearsay.
Mr Flanagan added: “May was one of the heaviest months on record for entertainment news consumption, but it will almost certainly be surpassed in June with the shocking news of Michael Jackson’s death driving high volumes of traffic to these sites.” Online news is growing and is very much here to stay.
News and Public Relations news posted by Burt Ernstein on 02 July 2009
