Fox News' online ascent continues, as the network's formerly lightly-trafficked Web site FoxNews.com has significantly improved its numbers for several key engagement scores over the past year as its audience has steadily climbed, according to newly-released data from Nielsen Online.According to Nielsen, FoxNews.com's audience ballooned by nearly 50 percent in April to 15.7 million uniques versus the 10.5 million reached during the same month in 2008. The site reaches over 18 million users when all of its sub-domain URLs are included (such as Fox News' mobile site and FoxBusiness.com).
But even more eye-catching is overall increase in FoxNews.com¹s stickiness. For example, the site¹s total page views jumped by 75 percent in April, going from 382 million last year to 669 million this year.
That's more page views than were recorded by category giant Yahoo News (which generated 614 million), despite reaching an audience less than half its size (Yahoo officials contend that the home page for Yahoo News does not automatically refresh its content, limiting the total number of page views it serves).
Furthermore, when examined on an individual site vs. site basis, FoxNews.com led all the major sites in Nielsen¹s News and Information category in time per person (an average of 39.9 minutes, just edging CNN.com) and pages per person (an average of 43, four more than the AOL News) in April. However, CNN leads both categories when all of its sub-domains are factored in, per Nielsen.
On a macro basis, FoxNews.com still trails the category¹s top players by a wide margin, as MSNBC's, Yahoo's and CNNs total audiences each regularly approach the 40 million unique level when all of their sub-domains are included.
However for the first time in recent memory, in a head to head matchup FoxNews.com is within 6.4 million unique users of CNN.com,and less than a million users behind NYTimes.com.