So you like to read all the dirt on Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton? That seems to be the case as Gossip blogs such as PerezHilton.com, TMZ.com, Egotastic.com and the top 20 gossip blogs in general saw an increase in traffic of 214% from March 2006 to March 2007, according to a report issued today from online competitive intelligence gatherers at Hitwise. Perez Hilton is arguably the most popular of the celebrity bloggers, and the market share of visits (not including RSS feeds) to his website rose 621% from March 2006 to March 2007, the report says. We know Layer 8 is number one in your heart though. Additional interesting findings from the report include:
* The market share of visits to the top 10 news and media websites declined by almost 4% from March 2006 to March 2007, indicating that news consumption is beginning to fragment as users expand their range of news sources to non-traditional news websites, the report says. * Search engines, portal frontpages, and news aggregators were the leading sources of traffic to news and media websites in March 2007. The share of visits to News and Media websites from search engines increased over the past year, with traffic from Google increasing by 30% for Print websites and 36% for Broadcast Media websites. * Online video has had a major impact on the News and Media industry over the past year: the share of traffic leaving News and Media websites and going directly to Entertainment – Multimedia websites increased by 196% from April 2006 to March 2007. Events which involved user-generated video, such as in the death of Steve Irwin and the execution of Saddam Hussein, served to drive the increase in traffic between News and Media and Multimedia websites.
