Survey: Almost half of Google News users don't go to news sites

Posted by Leah McBride Mensching on January 19, 2010 at 6:16 PM

Forty-four percent of people using Google News said they only scan the headlines and don't actually go on to the news sites themselves, according to a survey of online U.S. news consumers by research firm Outsell, paidContent reported today. And the more a user checks the news on Google News - "power news users," or those who checks more than twice daily - the less likely they are to click on a news link.

This study is expected to "provide further ammunition" to content creators who charge aggregators with not sharing ad revenue they make on providing links to news articles, Agence France-Presse noted.

Google points out that its News service sends billions of clicks to news sites each month. A spokesman told paidContent that the online search giant only shows "enough for users to identify the stories they're interested in - a headline, a short snippet and a link to the publisher's site - and we direct users to those news sites to read the stories."

Ken Doctor, an analyst for Outsell, said in a statement that although Google is driving traffic to newspapers, "it's also taking a significant share away."

The study also notes newspapers that put up paywalls and blog online aggregators may not like those results either, as just 10 percent of the 2,787 people surveyed said they would be willing to pay for a print subscription to gain online access, and 75 percent said they would just go to another news source, BizJournals reported.