Britons Look Overseas for War Coverage Online

The American news sites cnn.com and news.google.com experienced the biggest monthly audience increases among UK surfers in March as Britons turned to the Internet to find different perspectives on the war in Iraq. Figures released this week by Nielsen//NetRatings show that the news sector as a whole saw a 25% jump in audience during March, with audiences peaking at 1.3 million on March 20th, the day war was declared.

cnn.com saw the highest increase in Unique Audience with a rise of 96% on the previous month, whilst the search engine Google's recently launched news service saw a 79% increase in Unique Audience in the same period.

Among British sites, timesonline.co.uk and the telegraph.co.uk outperformed the sector in general, with audience rises of 44% and 49% respectively. Overall, news.bbc.co.uk remains the most popular news website in the country by a considerable margin, and guardian.co.uk retains its position as the most popular newspaper website.

'These figures show the desire of British surfers to get a real range of informed opinion on the war,' said Tom Ewing, Internet Analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings. 'cnn.com offers visitors an American view, whilst the Google service works by linking to a range of sources on each topic. Despite being launched at the end of March, and repeated hacking attacks which attempted to disable the site, Al Jazeera's English website still managed to get almost 50,000 visitors. In contrast, tabloid newspaper sites and other services like Ananova, which are seen as taking a less in-depth approach, showed none or very little change in Unique Audience.'

The average weekday news audience rose from 933,000 (the last full week before the war) to 1,146,000 in the first full week of war, week commencing March 26th. The day the war started March 20th saw the highest online news audiences of March, with 1,334,000 Britons visiting a news site. 'This shows that the Internet comes into its own when fast-moving news stories are involved,' Ewing said, 'Visitors are checking back on a daily basis to get the latest information.'

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

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