Audience for online news 'grew in February'

20th March 2008

The online web audience for news grew last month, new figures suggest.

According to comScore, the business/finance category of current affairs witnessed six per cent growth in February, while the general news category saw a two per cent increase during the month.

The digital world analyst's top 50 web rankings report observes that Yahoo! Finance, AOL Money & Finance and MSN Money led the former category, while the latter sector was driven by Yahoo! News, CNN and MSNBC.

Concerns about the economy and public interest in the presidential primaries were said to be fuelling the development, which took the audience for business/finance news to 62 million visitors and the audience for general news to 107 million visitors.

The news follows a previous report from comScore which found that heavy bloggers also tend to consume larger quantities of news online than their lighter counterparts.

Meanwhile, February also saw the greetings, e-cards, flowers and gifts categories grow - a trend attributed to Valentine's Day - while the websites of individual presidential candidates also saw an increase in visits.