44 of Google News Visitors Don t Click Through

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44% Of Google News Visitors Don't Click Through

By: Jordan McCollum
2010-01-22

The third annual News Users report from research firm Outsell has some interesting findings. While more and more people are going online for their news...

...and fewer people are getting their information from newspapers, it seems that many online news consumers are more like . . . well, grazers. And this might actually be good news for Germanys Federation of Newspaper Publishers.

TechCrunch reports that 44% of US visitors to Google News do not click on any headlines, preferring instead to skim article snippets. Unsurprisingly, the Internet is becoming an ever more popular source for news, especially what Outsell calls news right now, with 56% of consumers turning to online news sources (up from 33% a few years ago).

Google News and other aggregators are a more likely destination than a single papers website, as well, with 31% going for the aggregator and only 8% picking a news site. (18% chose other. I guess, with rounding errors, that adds up to the 56ish% turning to online news sources?)

Of course, the numbers on the Internet eroding newspapers subscriber base arent surprising. Two months ago, we saw that American consumers were will to pay as much as $3 a month for their news (which I thought was kind of crappy, though many disagreed). Turns out its even crappier than I thought"according to Outsell, 75% would turn to a different source if their local newspaper sites put up a pay wall, and only 10% are willing to pay for a newspaper subscription to get online access. (Cough, NY Times, cough.)

The more interesting concept here, however, is that Outsell sees Google News becoming a destination for news instead of a starting point, like Google Search is. That might actually bode well for at least one competitor"Germanys Federation of Newspaper Publishers. As we saw yesterday, the publishers are suing Google News as a monopoly for displaying snippets from their stories. (Robots.txt. Srsly.) If it turns out that many consumers are only reading the snippets and German newspapers arent seeing the downstream traffic, their case may have a little more merit.

And then they could just block Google News.

What do you think? Is Google News (along with other aggregators) becoming a destination for online news? Will this US data help out the German newspaper publishers case?

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About the Author:
Jordan McCollum is a staff writer for the popular marketing blog Marketing Pilgrim. She has worked in search engine optimization with clients including 3M, Little Giant Ladders and ADP. After graduating from Brigham Young University, Jordan joined the SEO copywriting team at the Internet marketing firm 10x Marketing. After 10x closed its doors in December 2006, Jordan became a freelance writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in SEO. She also has extensive experience with web analytics, conversion rate enhancement and e-mail marketing.


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