This week kicked off with the Associated Press voicing concerns about how websites obtain permission to distribute content and share revenues. A debate has sparked about the ‘fair use’ doctrine (publishing a headline and/or sentence from story) and tracking the legal use of the content. Search engines and news aggregators were all somewhat implicated as those who may be misusing content, so we decided to take a look at their impact upon driving traffic to news websites, which ultimately generate ad revenues.
Like many categories, search is one of the main sources that drive traffic to the News & Media category, referring nearly 22% of visits in March 2009. Branded searches for news properties represent a large share of the top search terms driving traffic to the category. Another major source is the front pages of portals such as Yahoo! and MSN, including the personalized versions like My Yahoo and My MSN. In comparison, social networking websites and blogs referred a far smaller share of visits to News & Media websites from links or references posted on their pages.

Traffic moving between News & Media websites is also a main source of traffic equal to search at 21.63% in March 2009. However, the shares of the sources are distributed broadly across a wide number of websites where the highest share coming from any one website was only 2.28%.

Although several of the online aggregators are at the heart of the content distribution argument, they do successfully send visits to news properties rather than keeping them upon their own websites. Two sources that have increased the share of referrals in March 2009 when compared to March 2008 are Drudge Report and The Huffington Post. Others that have remained consistent include Google News, Yahoo! News and My Yahoo.

Here is a more detailed breakdown of the categories driving traffic to the News & Media category in March 2009.