Nearly 55 million Americans (some 28% of US Internet users) visited an entertainment news site in May 2009—a 7% increase from a year earlier, according to a comScore report on visitation and video viewership at entertainment news sites.
omg!, Yahoo's celebrity gossip site, led the category with 20.6 million visitors in May, nearly doubling its audience in the past year, the report found
Online video has become an increasingly important channel for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed increasing 53% in the past year, comScore found.
TMZ led the category in April with 2 million video viewers and 10.3 million videos viewed.
Top Entertainment News Sites
Trailing omg! in unique visitors, TMZ captured the No. 2 spot with 9.9 million visitors (up 7% versus year ago), followed by People with 8.2 million visitors.
Significant gains were made by USmagazine.com, up 325%, to 6.5 million visitors; Entertainment Weekly, up 64%, to nearly 4 million visitors; and The Insider, which grew 215%, to 2.5 million visitors.
"May was one of the heaviest months on record for entertainment news consumption, but it will almost certainly be surpassed in June with the shocking news of Michael Jackson's death driving high volumes of traffic to these sites," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice-president.
"While most entertainment news sites will see gains in June, TMZ is primed for an especially big month as the first outlet to report the news, which generated thousands of inbound links to the site."
Big Potential in Online Video
In April, 34.8 million videos were viewed on entertainment news sites, an increase of 52% from a year earlier, comScore found.
TMZ is the clear leader in the category, followed by omg!. More than 1.7 million viewers watched 3.8 million videos at omg!; third-place ETOnline.com served 3.9 million videos to 1.5 million viewers in April.
Work and Play
Nearly half of the time that US Internet users spent on entertainment news sites in May was while using computers at work:
In total, Americans spent more than 893 million minutes—or approximately 15 million hours—on entertainment news sites, with 44% of the total time spent in the category occurring at work.
