The recent economic crisis has lead to increasing number of visitors to news websites. On a comparison with the top three UK News websites, Yahoo, Google and MSN by Hitwise, it was found that all three websites are having huge increase in traffic during the last few months.
The report also depicts that Google has seen the most consistent traffic over the last three years and that Yahoo! has increased in its market share during 2008. However, Google relies on third-party websites for its traffic and its own properties constitute only 67.2% while Yahoo has 84.6% and MSN with 81.8%.
Analyzing the email patterns, Robin Goad, Research Director for Hitwise UK stated that 18.9% of people who visit Yahoo UK News later go for an email service while just 1.7% of Google UK News visitors use an email service afterwards. The reason being, Google users send a link to the original story instead of links to Google News.
The recent downward trend in the global markets has made more UK visitors show interest in news which has resulted in an overall traffic increase in all news websites.