Online news visitors double in week of US attacks

The number of Americans visiting online news sites almost doubled in the week of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, with an average of 11.7 million users logging onto news sites each day.

Moments after the first reports surfaced of the destruction caused to the World Trade Center, and then the Pentagon, Internet users around the world turned to the major online news outlets for information about the attacks. According to Internet research company Jupiter MMXI, the online news category grew by almost 80 percent between 11 and 16 September compared to the previous week.

The British-based BBC.co.uk and Guardian.co.uk news services experienced a significant growth in traffic that week, as well as the US newswires CNN.com, ABCNews.com, MSNBC.com and Time.com.

The UK online news category experienced more than a 35 percent growth in the number of British visitors logging onto the Net for information.

BBC.co.uk grew by more than 260 percent, from 146,000 to 526,000 average daily unique US visitors.

ABCNews.com chose to broadcast its live TV coverage online in the week of the attacks, and witnessed a 360 percent increase in its average number of unique users each day as a result. The Jupiter MMXI report claims that ABCNews.com's traffic rose from 272,000 unique visitors in the week ending 9 September, to 1,257,00 in the week ending 16 September.

The CNN.com Web site had 4.6 million unique visitors accessing its site from the US each day, and was the sixth most visited site in America. A total of 17.2 million people visited CNN.com in the four days after the US bombings.

See the Internet News Section for full coverage.

Have your say instantly, and see what others have said. Click on the TalkBack button and go to the Telecoms forum.

Let the editors know what you think in the Mailroom. And read other letters.