Tuesday, February 02, 2010

44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers

Research firm Outsell has published its News Users 2009 Report, which is based on a survey about the online and offline news preferences of 2,787 U.S. news consumers.

Analyzing the usage patterns on how users consume news content, the report concludes that fewer and fewer users are actually going to destination sites of publishers and, instead, are consuming content on so-called aggregator sites (e.g. Google News, etc.).

The report states “Though Google is driving some traffic to newspapers, it’s also taking a significant share away. A full 44 percent of visitors to Google News scan headlines without accessing newspapers’ individual sites.”

The report states that users are more likely to turn to an aggregator (31 percent) than a newspaper site (8 percent) or other site (18 percent).

However, the problem with aggregators such as Google News is that the publishers, though providing their content to aggregators, are not participating in the revenues generated.

We at kikin believe that it is crucial to bring the content to the user rather than thinking the user would come to the destination site - which this study shows users do less and less often. We call this the ‘user-centric web’ – let relevant content come to me rather than force me into silo’ed web experiences.

BUT: Publishers should be in control of how their content is displayed when it is served ‘offshore’ (i.e. outside of the publisher's site) and publishers should be in control of how they monetize their content in such cases.

kikin is offering exactly that to publishers.