Top 10 General News Sites by Unique Visitors

Comscore announced an analysis of consumer activity at general news sites in June 2006. More than
54 percent of all U.S. Internet users visited sites in the General News category in June 2006, demonstrating consumers’ reliance on the Web as a source for news information.

 US:

                                                                
                                                        Jun-06                Reach
    Total Internet: Total Audience          172,907                 N/A
    General News                                 94,070                100%
    Yahoo! News                                  31,186                 33%
    MSNBC                                          23,393                 25%
    AOL News                                      20,405                 22%
    CNN                                              19,891                 21%
    Internet Broadcasting                      9,518                 10%
    The New York Times Brand               8,593                  9%
    Tribune Newspapers                         8,456                  9%
    Knight Ridder Digital                         7,585                  8%
    ABCNEWS DIGITAL                          7,533                  8%
    USATODAY Sites                              7,252                  8%
 Worldwide:

                                                         
                                                         Jun-06                Reach
    Total Internet: Total Audience          712,976                 N/A
    General News                                319,964                100%
    Yahoo! News                                  76,245                 24%
    CNN                                              30,413                 10%
    MSNBC                                          28,557                  9%
    163.COM News                                28,484                  9%
    QQ.COM News                                 26,178                  8%
    SINA News                                     25,810                  8%
    AOL News                                      23,901                  7%
    The New York Times Brand              13,068                  4%
    BBC UKFS News (excl. home page)   11,949                  4%
    TOM.COM News                               10,016                  3%
What astonishes me is that Yahoo! News, MSN News and AOL News rank this high. I believe these three News sites are mostly driven by the massive Email accounts and should be measured differently. If I remember right MSN Hotmail and the others redirect you to their news site once you logged out of your account. It doesn’t really mean that anybody reads theses News. An Eyetracking study would be very interesting regarding these sites.