News.bbc.co.uk Leads the UK's Online News Sector

According to the latest research from Nielsen//NetRatings, the UK's most popular source for news and information is the news.bbc.co.uk, which regularly attracts a unique audience of at least two million visitors per month. In the last six months, its audience peaked in June 2002 when over three million people went to the site from home or work.

In terms of the newspapers' websites, guardian.co.uk receives the most visitors, regularly attracting a unique audience of over one million visitors per month to its site. In the last six months, its audience peaked in May 2002 with 1,158,000 visitors from home and work combined. cnn.com, ft.com and the telegraph.co.uk follow in terms of unique audience, with on average half a million visitors per month.

However, in terms of time spent on each site, news.bbc.co.uk performs best with up to 55 minutes on average in a month, driven to a large extent by work users. Amongst the online newspapers, telegraph.co.uk performs best, with visitors spending between 16 and 27 minutes each per month between May and October 2002. In the last six months, ft.com has experienced a decline in the amount of time its visitors spend on its site overall since it introduced charging in July. Time spent per person per experienced a decline in July when ft.com introduced a subscription model for some of its services.

The research illustrates that although users are generally loyal to a single printed newspaper, the Internet gives them the opportunity to use other news websites. For instance, independent.co.uk shared 40% of its monthly audience in October with guardian.co.uk and timesonline.co.uk shared 34% of its October monthly audience with telegraph.co.uk.

Certain kinds of content are popular on particular sites, with a large number of telegraph.co.uk's visitors going to the sports section, and guardian.co.uk's media section being particularly popular.

Tom Ewing, Analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings says 'The drop in time spent on the ft.com site illustrates a dilemma for website owners. As with other categories, the news sites need to cover the cost of their site or to generate revenue from it. To do this, some like ft.com offer a wider range of services, not just updated news, but e-mail and personal office accounts, research services and even financial information. Whilst subscribers loyal to the brand and website are prepared to pay, those visitors who were using the site for free could be deterred, and therefore we would expect to see a fall in time spent overall.'

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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