I noticed earlier this week that the #2 website visited after websites in the News and Media category is Legacy.com. Legacy.com is an obit website. The table below shows the top 10 downstream websites from the News and Media category last week (based on share of US Internet visits week to 22nd March 2008).

I found this pretty interesting. We always hear about the death of classified advertising and how this is hurting regional newspapers. But this is another service traditionally offered by regional papers that I have heard little about.
Legacy.com was the #1 Lifestyle-Family website last week and ranked #53 among All Categories of Websites. Most of the top 100 websites are ones I am familiar with – Legacy.com is new to me. Traffic to Legacy.com has been climbing steadily over the past year with share of US internet visits up 81% year on year last week, up 36% in the past six months and up 15% in the past three months.
Last week, Legacy.com received 64% of its traffic from News and Media websites. The following table shows the top 10 websites in that category sending traffic to Legacy.com. It reads like a who’s who of local newspapers. Most of this traffic is coming from obits hosted by Legacy.com for these regional papers.

An interesting niche carved out has created a top 100 website.