Report: How CNN Trounces Competitors On The Web

From Nieman Journalism Lab:

For the past several years, news outlets that cover the media industry have focused predominantly on television ratings when reporting on the cable news wars — a metric that, at least until recently, has been almost exclusively dominated by the Fox News Channel. But underlying all the ratings horse-race stories has been a burgeoning thread of discussion on one metric that Fox isn’t ruling: online readership.

Using numbers from multiple analytics firms, it has long been apparent that CNN beats not only its cable news competitors on the web, but nearly every other major news source, as well. According to comScore, CNN received an average of 8.5 million unique U.S. visitors a day for the first three months of this year, figures that dwarf MSNBC’s 7.4 million daily visitors and Fox’s 2.3 million.

In U.S. monthly uniques, CNN outperforms MSNBC.com (51 million), AOL News (40 million), Fox News (20 million), CBS News (16.4 million), and The New York Times (32.9 million).

Figures from Compete tell a similar story, though with radically different numbers — 27.7 million uniques for CNN, 18.3 million for The New York Times, and 14.7 million for Fox News. And unlike MSNBC.com, Yahoo!, and AOL, CNN doesn’t have a major news portal funneling traffic to its site.

Why does CNN trounce all its competitors on the web? AdWeek took a stab at this question a year ago, suggesting that it might have to do with the demographics of CNN viewers and the idea that Fox News’ brand of opinionated journalism doesn’t automatically work well on the web. “People shouting at each other doesn’t translate to a mass audience online,” a source told AdWeek’s Mike Shields. But Meredith Artley, the managing editor of CNN.com, told me in a phone interview that the network owes its online success to what she calls the “Pilates strategy.”

“What that means, as someone who has friends who do Pilates but has never done it herself, is that it’s about strengthening your core and stretching into new areas,” she said.

The core, as she sees it, is breaking news. “But that’s not enough; you can’t do just that alone. You have to go beyond that. To that end, you have to stretch into new areas and try new things and innovate and play and experiment.”

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