Digital Quarters – Ben Elowitz
Wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz on the Future of Digital Media
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About Ben Elowitz
About Ben Elowitz Ben Elowitz is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint, a technology platform company that is reinventing the media model on the social web. The company attracts more than 15 million unique visitors monthly on its platform. In addition to Digital Quarters, he writes Media Success, a bold and forthright newsletter for digital media thought leaders. His work has been featured in FORTUNE, TechCrunch, All Things D, The Huffington Post, Forbes, TIME, CNNMoney, paidContent, and CNBC.com, among others. Prior to Wetpaint, Ben co-founded Blue Nile (NILE), the largest online retailer of luxury goods. Ben was also an early employee at Fatbrain.com (FATB), an ecommerce company that went public in 1998 and was sold to Barnes & Noble in 1999. Ben holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is an angel investor in a number of media and ecommerce companies, and is a frequent conference speaker on digital media, social content, and entrepreneurship.
Posts Tagged ‘MTV’
Social Leaderboard in April: New Heights
29 May2012
by Ben Elowitz
While top publishers pull 5% of traffic from social, Wetpaint breaks a record at 38%
I was pretty excited in December when Wetpaint Entertainment became the #1 social publisher on the web, but this month’s Social Leaderboard chart is like that rare but spectacular sunny day in Seattle. For the sake of modesty, I’ll explain further down the page.
Mostly Cloudy
Unfortunately, the sun isn’t shining on everyone. Total social traffic to the Top 50 publishers fell by 13% in April. As for social traffic as a percent of overall traffic, the average publisher lost 1.5 percentage points. In fact, 48 of the Top 50 publishers lost ground on social traffic composition this month.
Facebook’s April experiments and changes to the EdgeRank algorithm are likely to blame. Publishers who put Facebook at the center of their distribution strategy were able to rebound quickly, while others fell behind.
Who’s Weathering the Storm?
MTV made good on its reputation as one of the most social-savvy TV brands by breaking into the Top Five (and bumping CBS down to #7). People reclaimed the #2 spot that it ceded to NBC in March.
Three new players showed up in the Top Ten this month: welcome, The Guardian, Patch, and Yahoo!! The Guardian gets the “most improved” award for advancing from 14th place all the way up to #6.
Of course, as in The Hunger Games, we can’t all be winners on the Social Leaderboard. MLB, Break, and Us Magazine – three publishers who have consistently been in the Top Ten since January – were washed downstream in April. Us Magazine in particular is all wet: after slipping slowly from #3 to #5 to #6 over the last few months, it plummeted to #18 in April. Ouch.
And Who’s Outperforming the Rest by 3X?
Not only is Wetpaint Entertainment the #1 social publisher for the fifth month in a row, but we’re now getting 38% (a Leaderboard record) of our traffic from social. That’s more than 3x the social traffic of the second-best social performer (People), and almost 8x the average publisher (Top 50 average = 5%). All in a month where we had record reach, as well (more on that soon).
Thanks to the team for working so hard to build and execute a best-in-class social distribution strategy that’s a cut (or two or three) above the rest.
Social Leaderboard: March Results
2 May2012
by Ben Elowitz
How much social traffic did the top 50 web publishers attract in March? The results are in – and it is a mixed month.
More Social Traffic
Measuring by total visits, March was the second highest month on record for social traffic to the top publishers. The number of social (Facebook + Twitter) visits to the top 50 grew by 2.9% in March to 403 million.
But a Smaller Piece of the Pie
Volume growth aside, social’s share of traffic to the top 50 dropped slightly, dipping by 0.3% in March. That’s because even while traffic from social grew, it didn’t grow as fast as traffic from other sources.
What gives? It’s possible that each and every one of the top publishers’ social media teams was distracted last month by March Madness and solar flares. It’s also possible that Facebook’s aggressive mobile push is putting downward pressure on this measurement (the comScore data we use for benchmarking overall site traffic doesn’t include mobile traffic, alas).
The Contenders: NBC climbs, Us Magazine falls, and Wetpaint stays on top
The solar flares must have been particularly distracting to one publisher’s social team: Us Magazine continued its downward slide, falling out of the top 5 entirely this time after dropping last month from 3rd to 5th.
NBC is on a roll, climbing up another rung (after jumping two spots ahead in February) to #2 on the leaderboard. NFL also ran the ball for an impressive number of yards, moving from #9 to #5.
Wetpaint Entertainment continued to hold a definitive lead, outperforming the closest rival by 9.3 percentage points. We’re able to maintain this lead by constantly improving our proprietary social analytics and distribution system through rapid experimentation and a deep understanding of our audience. The amazing thing is that our social growth has not come at the expense of search traffic. Indeed, our search traffic has been rising as a result of our social success, and total traffic has recently hit record highs of 10 million uniques and more.
And we’re not done yet – social users are the most valuable users, and we want more.
- In: Facebook|Publishing platforms|Social Networks
- Tags: AOL, BBC, cbs, CNN, Digital Media, Facebook, MLB, msn, MTV, nbc, NFL, People, smo, social distribution, social media optimization, Social Web, Time, TMZ, twitter, US Magazine, washington post, Wetpaint, yahoo
by Erik Flannigan
This piece from Erik Flannigan is the fifth in a series of 10 posts about the future of the media industry contained in a report titled: Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web.
Q: How does the rise of Facebook change the relationship between media and its audience?
Facebook is a platform, not just a Web site, and it has created a public sentiment meter. In fact, sometimes there seems to be wild over-reactions to the sentiment expressed by the “Like” button. And many people might suggest that “Like” has created a currency of some kind. Whether it’s actually worth something or not remains to be seen, however. It may end up being the lowest possible of all audience benchmarks of interest. We don’t know yet. Some of our properties get modest traffic through Facebook; others get 75-80 percent of their traffic through Facebook. From my perspective, though, it offers a measure of sentiment, a measure of what is most socially relevant.
Q: What’s changed fundamentally about media with the rise of the social Web, and what do publishers need to do to adapt?
On some level, the social Web breaks down the walls for those who want to go there. Real people tell us how they feel in an unvarnished way, in an unfiltered way. There is a fan base that’s active on social media platforms that wants more, and that is looking for relationships with shows and personalities. That means we have to create more and more digital content, and it has to be content that can stand alone. If you want to build a fan base, you have to do this with content. And this has probably made us at MTV think more about marketing our shows all year long, not just at premiere.
Q: We’ve gone from SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to SMO (Social Media Optimization), so how will search change as the Web becomes more social?
Search is like fixing your tire. There are times when you have to do it. So, it will continue. That said, the idea that search is the end all and be all is definitely changing. We saw this in focus groups we did with young men. They said if something is important enough, it will find me. All I need is Twitter and a newsfeed. Also, I think more and more people understand that search is a game, that the search system is gamed. And so, search has become less satisfying, and consumers are moving away from their reliance on search. Social filters are better and more timely, especially because you can run out of things to search for. We’re moving to a future where we’ll have some version of tracking, managing and increasing prominence of the super-influencers. And I believe that parsing out the most influential of your social followers will become big, and become a business.
Q: How do you build a brand in publishing when, with greater frequency, media is distributed through social channels?
It’s tough. And it’s easy to disassociate brands and content. That’s why we need to do more when it comes to thinking things through to the end experience. This is important, and you can see that consumers are giving publishers credit when there’s an open dialogue. Instagram is a good example here. They have thought about the end-to-end experience. It’s much more than a name. Its identity is tied to an experience, to sharing. And they didn’t allow themselves to just be a platform. They are aspiring to become a noun, not just a brand.
Q: What are the critical success factors in publishing as we look to 2020; and who will be the winners?
We must fix the issue of monetization in digital space. There is a horrible battle brewing between the growth of the audience and the lack of currency to monetize. And there’s nothing – no real answers – on the horizon. TV has been online for five years, for example, and the problem hasn’t been solved. There’s big growth and big innovation, and yet we haven’t figured this out.
Erik Flannigan joined MTV Networks from AOL, where he was vice president of programming. Before that, he was at Buena Vista Datacasting / The Walt Disney Company as vice president of programming. And prior to that, he served as vice president of music services and programming at RealNetworks. Earlier, Flannigan was senior vice president, Entertainment Verticals, for the Walt Disney Internet Group.
To download the complete report, please click here: “Rebooting Media: The Digital Publishing Revolution for a Fully Social Web”
by Ben Elowitz
Regular readers know that it’s only a matter of months before social becomes the most valuable source of traffic for most publishers.
And this month’s Media Industry Social Leaderboard is sure to make you even more convinced. So let me get straight to it: From November to December, the amount of traffic the top 50* publishers received from social grew by a whopping 17%.
And, when it comes to who is best benefiting from social, let’s just say I’m personally very proud to announce the new leader, which, for the sake of modesty, I’ll do lower down the page.
Social Traffic Surging
As noted previously, the major changes Facebook announced at September’s f8 event caused a significant blunt in traffic to publishers last fall. Well, the hangover has ended. With 385 million aggregate visits to the top 50 publishers in December, volumes have recovered to pre-f8 levels.
The average top 50 publisher is now receiving almost 8 million visits per month from Facebook and Twitter. And in December, 48 of the top 50 publishers saw increased social traffic levels over November, with these publishers averaging a 2.1 percentage point increase in their composition.
At the same time, Twitter has grown in its contribution to the traffic pie, increasing over the course of the fall months from 2.2% of total in September to 3.4% in December.
A New Leader: Wetpaint Ranks #1
As you know from my prior columns, one of the reasons I’ve published this leaderboard is because we set a goal for Wetpaint to reach #1. What I didn’t tell you previously is the timing: our goal was to do so by the end of 2011. And there is nothing we get more proud of here at Wetpaint than meeting our goals.
In December, Wetpaint Entertainment social traffic benchmarked at 20.8% of visits, even as our total traffic was at near-record levels. (Our internal numbers show an even higher contribution.) This outranks all of the top 50 web publishers, besting the number-two by nearly five points.
Allow me a moment to kvell: I could not be more proud of the entire Wetpaint team who have achieved this goal. Beyond the amazing results, they have built an amazing social distribution system and playbook that leads the industry. With the virtuous cycle the team has built, we are getting significantly better every month.
Other Movers and Shakers
How did the other leaders from prior months do? People, the previous leader, improved with 16.1% of traffic from social, increasing by 3.9 percentage points even as it fell to the #2 position.
In third place now, US Magazine vaulted all the way up from position 19, improving from an average 3.9% to achieve 14.3% of their traffic from social. If you have any idea what drove their results, let me know.
As for places #4 and #5, CBS and NBC traded their two slots, with NBC gaining by 4.2 percentage points while CBS gained by only 3.5 points. And all of that activity pushed MTV down to #6, gaining far slower than the others. All the details are, as usual, in the table below.
Facebook Is Sending More Traffic Out
Publishers are clearly benefiting as Facebook delivers on its potential to be not just a network but a social operating system for the internet. In December, we saw the best increases go to the most social publishers (top 10 on this leaderboard), who saw a 4.5 percentage point increase in social traffic composition month to month.
Innovation is attracting large audiences on Facebook. In particular, the four publishers driving traffic via social readers have increased their share of Facebook traffic to the Top 50 web publishers by 70%. Yahoo (not included in the 4 just described) has also begun experimenting with social reader tools across select sites and is seeing strong early results as well. In just two months, Yahoo! News US has reportedly seen a 300% increase in Facebook traffic, driven by 1 million “reads” shared daily.
The Traffic Land Grab Is On Now
We are clearly in the land grab phase on the social web. Those who are investing early in social as a top objective stand to gain the most – while others may be left behind.
But as my discussions with other media companies show, social is not a simple check-box initiative. It requires complete buy-in from the CEO to transform the organization with social distribution technology and expertise.
It can be done, as our own experience at Wetpaint as shown: In less than two years, we have launched a new property and already outranked all of the top 50 publishers on the web. Now we want more. And I hope you do too.
Details for all 50 top publishers:
|
MONTHLY RANKINGS |
PUBLISHER |
|
|
||||
|
Dec |
Nov |
Oct |
Name of Publisher (Owner) |
URL |
Monthly Uniques |
% from Social |
Change |
|
1 |
2 |
3 |
Wetpaint Entertainment |
WETPAINT.COM |
3,076,202 |
20.8% |
10.1% |
|
2 |
1 |
1 |
People |
PEOPLE.COM |
13,203,882 |
16.1% |
3.9% |
|
3 |
21 |
19 |
US Weekly |
USMAGAZINE.COM |
9,339,801 |
14.3% |
10.4% |
|
4 |
5 |
5 |
NBC Universal |
NBC.COM |
6,972,501 |
12.3% |
4.2% |
|
5 |
4 |
4 |
CBS |
CBS.COM |
7,367,642 |
11.7% |
3.5% |
|
6 |
3 |
2 |
MTV |
MTV.COM |
9,920,294 |
10.7% |
2.1% |
|
7 |
6 |
7 |
TMZ |
TMZ.COM |
13,208,667 |
9.6% |
2.2% |
|
8 |
13 |
16 |
Break Media |
BREAK.COM |
8,603,649 |
9.4% |
4.2% |
|
9 |
8 |
6 |
Major League Baseball |
MLB.COM |
6,653,288 |
9.3% |
2.3% |
|
10 |
9 |
11 |
Patch (Aol) |
PATCH.COM |
9,917,563 |
8.7% |
2.2% |
|
11 |
14 |
12 |
Discovery Channel |
DISCOVERY.COM |
12,769,340 |
8.5% |
3.4% |
|
12 |
7 |
9 |
Yahoo! |
YAHOO.COM |
167,257,797 |
7.6% |
0.5% |
|
13 |
10 |
10 |
Aol |
AOL.COM |
50,093,953 |
7.4% |
1.1% |
|
14 |
15 |
15 |
CNN |
CNN.COM |
45,650,334 |
7.1% |
2.1% |
|
15 |
12 |
13 |
IGN (News Corp) |
IGN.COM |
10,263,828 |
6.7% |
1.4% |
|
16 |
23 |
25 |
MailOnline |
DAILYMAIL.CO.UK |
16,656,093 |
6.4% |
2.8% |
|
17 |
25 |
22 |
TIME |
TIME.COM |
9,256,468 |
6.3% |
2.7% |
|
18 |
16 |
14 |
TV Guide |
TVGUIDE.COM |
7,546,763 |
6.0% |
1.3% |
|
19 |
11 |
8 |
The Guardian |
GUARDIAN.CO.UK |
8,495,543 |
6.0% |
0.0% |
|
20 |
19 |
18 |
FOX News (News Corp) |
FOXNEWS.COM |
24,444,163 |
5.9% |
1.3% |
|
21 |
29 |
23 |
CBS News |
CBSNEWS.COM |
12,064,240 |
5.7% |
2.6% |
|
22 |
24 |
26 |
CBS Local |
CBSLOCAL.COM |
9,574,168 |
5.7% |
2.1% |
|
23 |
20 |
27 |
The Washington Post |
WASHINGTONPOST.COM |
18,671,039 |
5.5% |
1.4% |
|
24 |
18 |
17 |
MSN |
MSN.COM |
111,990,691 |
5.3% |
0.7% |
|
25 |
30 |
32 |
New York Daily News |
NYDAILYNEWS.COM |
9,585,617 |
5.1% |
2.1% |
|
26 |
17 |
20 |
BBC News |
BBC.CO.UK |
14,480,236 |
5.1% |
0.4% |
|
27 |
41 |
36 |
FORBES |
FORBES.COM |
12,232,929 |
5.0% |
3.0% |
|
28 |
26 |
31 |
The Huffington Post (Aol) |
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM |
36,196,784 |
5.0% |
1.6% |
|
29 |
31 |
28 |
New York Post |
NYPOST.COM |
8,085,270 |
4.8% |
1.8% |
|
30 |
37 |
41 |
Bleacher Report |
BLEACHERREPORT.COM |
9,178,003 |
4.7% |
2.4% |
|
31 |
22 |
21 |
New York Times |
NYTIMES.COM |
30,575,839 |
4.6% |
0.8% |
|
32 |
34 |
29 |
Cartoon Network (Turner) |
CARTOONNETWORK.COM |
10,600,092 |
4.5% |
1.7% |
|
33 |
33 |
30 |
Nickelodeon (MTV Networks) |
NICK.COM |
9,752,977 |
4.5% |
1.5% |
|
34 |
27 |
24 |
IMDB (Amazon.com) |
IMDB.COM |
38,220,405 |
4.3% |
0.9% |
|
35 |
32 |
35 |
Los Angeles Times (Tribune) |
LATIMES.COM |
17,080,642 |
4.2% |
1.2% |
|
36 |
40 |
39 |
FOX Sports (News Corp) |
FOXSPORTS.COM |
22,401,409 |
4.2% |
2.0% |
|
37 |
36 |
34 |
Food Network (Scripps) |
FOODNETWORK.COM |
19,614,352 |
3.8% |
1.2% |
|
38 |
39 |
37 |
Wall Street Journal (News Corp) |
WSJ.COM |
12,521,560 |
3.6% |
1.4% |
|
39 |
35 |
33 |
Allrecipes (Readers Digest) |
ALLRECIPES.COM |
25,288,480 |
3.5% |
0.8% |
|
40 |
45 |
42 |
CNET (CBS Interactive) |
CNET.COM |
28,948,963 |
3.1% |
1.5% |
|
41 |
38 |
38 |
Reuters |
REUTERS.COM |
11,692,493 |
3.0% |
0.7% |
|
42 |
44 |
45 |
CNBC |
CNBC.COM |
5,674,719 |
3.0% |
1.3% |
|
43 |
43 |
44 |
Bloomberg |
BLOOMBERG.COM |
7,515,601 |
2.8% |
1.1% |
|
44 |
46 |
47 |
Businessweek (Bloomberg) |
BUSINESSWEEK.COM |
7,964,543 |
2.6% |
1.0% |
|
45 |
28 |
43 |
USA Today (Gannet) |
USATODAY.COM |
17,222,775 |
2.6% |
-0.6% |
|
46 |
42 |
40 |
WebMD |
WEBMD.COM |
11,901,016 |
2.5% |
0.5% |
|
47 |
47 |
46 |
LIVESTRONG (Demand Media) |
LIVESTRONG.COM |
9,464,669 |
1.8% |
0.5% |
|
48 |
48 |
48 |
About.com (NY Times) |
ABOUT.COM |
58,684,194 |
1.6% |
0.6% |
|
49 |
50 |
50 |
eHow (Demand Media) |
EHOW.COM |
45,015,977 |
1.5% |
0.8% |
|
50 |
51 |
51 |
ThePostGame (Yahoo) |
THEPOSTGAME.COM |
18,321,581 |
1.4% |
0.8% |
|
51 |
49 |
49 |
Mayo Clinic |
MAYOCLINIC.COM |
9,198,317 |
1.4% |
0.5% |
* The publishers included in the Media Industry Social Leaderboard are the top 50, as ranked by comScore-reported uniques, whose primary business is web publishing. Once they are selected, data from Compete.com is used to estimate the amount of traffic referred to each by Facebook and Twitter.
- In: Facebook|Online News|Publishing platforms|Social Networks
- Tags: cbs, Facebook, MTV, nbc, new media, news, People, smo, Social Networks, TMZ, twitter, US Magazine, Wetpaint, yahoo
by Ben Elowitz
Back by popular demand is an updated ranking of the Media Industry Social Leaderboard. As a reminder, my company and I are obsessively focused on data about the social web – so much so, that we decided to track and publish not only our own results, but those of the top 50 media companies. This is all captured in the chart below which profiles the top 50 web publishers’ effectiveness at driving traffic from social media.
For the inquisitive among us, you’ll note that we determine the top 50 relevant web publishers; then, using data from Compete.com, we determine and chart how much of their traffic is from Facebook and Twitter.
One important note is that Facebook’s changes in its algorithms launched at F8 impacted nearly all publishers in this ranking – more on that in a moment.
But first, let’s get to the results:
Facebook Traffic Down by 13%.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the bars are lower this month. In fact, over 90% of the top 50 web publishers saw a decreased percentage of their visits coming from Facebook and Twitter in October, with the bars shortening on average by 50 basis points.
In terms of aggregate performance, if you sum the total Facebook visits for all properties, they’re down 7.1% October vs. September, and 12.8% comparing October vs. the pre-F8 August highs. We believe this trend is the direct result of the F8 algorithm changes made in mid-September. Savvy social publishers (ourselves included) have been battling to reclaim previous highs since the F8 changes; but by October few had recovered. The chart below highlights the reduction in referrals from Facebook to publishers over the course of their algorithmic change.
Winners and Losers: CBS down; People, MTV, Wetpaint up
CBS has continued to fall in social traffic composition (-3.7% September-over-August, -5.5% Octocber-over-September), moving from the top rank on the Media Industry Social Leaderboard to number 4. Unclear what has caused this decline although one hypothesis could be an increase in either SEO or paid audience acquisition. If you have any insight here, shoot me a note.
Closer to home, People, MTV, and Wetpaint maintained their relative rankings and have moved to the top 3 spots. At Wetpaint, we credit our climb up the ladder to our relentless A/B testing that has allowed us to understand what our audience desires in a deep way, and inform our editors with this insight. The result is that we are creating, packaging, and distributing the right content, at the right time and our audience has voted with clicks, likes, and shares.
- In: Facebook|Online News|Publishing platforms|Social Networks
- Tags: AOL, cbs, Facebook, MTV, nbc, new media, New York Times, news, People, smo, Social Networks, Time, TMZ, twitter, Wetpaint, yahoo
Introducing the Social Leaderboard
5 Oct2011
by Ben Elowitz
As I have shared previously, our goal at Wetpaint is to be the leader in building media properties on the social Web. That’s because I am seeing the web’s nature fundamentally change to become fully social. 
It’s not just theory – it’s data.
As I shared recently at AllThingsD.com, the social Web is capturing a dramatically increasing share of users’ attention – with internet users collectively increasing the amount of time they spend per month on Facebook by 69% over a one-year period – while usage for the entire rest of the Web, excluding Facebook, shrank by 9% over the same period.
Social is the most strategic medium for our industry. And yet we haven’t established how to track our collective progress.
So, I’d like to introduce to you the first industry effort to do so. I’ve released it this week, so that we can all compare ourselves with other top publishers and see our individual and collective progress.
Below you’ll find the “Media Industry Social Leaderboard”, a scoreboard and chart that was developed by tabulating the top 50 media publishers, based on monthly unique visitors, and then determining which were best at generating traffic from Facebook and Twitter. Of course, I’ve included Wetpaint Entertainment on the list because we are so committed to social that we are going to make our progress public. (And it doesn’t hurt that we are already significantly better at reaching audiences on these two key social platforms than many major media brands such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, CNN, Fox News, TMZ and others. My mother should finally be proud!)
This Month’s Findings
This month, we found that MTV’s website leads the pack with 14.3% of its traffic from Facebook and Twitter, indicating the shareability of their content (especially video, which is inherently more viral), and the heavily socialized audience they serve – not to mention their great execution. In fact, MTV beat average performance by a factor of two, and were one of only four out of the top 50 that were in the double digits. Sadly, over half of the Web’s top 50 had less than 4% of their traffic from social, making them menial performers on the medium.
Social Success Could Triple Your Audience’s Value
Lest you think that MTV’s 14.3% is anything to sneeze at, we dug a bit deeper to look at the true value of social. Beyond the boost to audience attraction, we also looked at audience retention. Measuring the visit frequency to each of the publishers (excluding the portals), we found a striking correlation to their sociability. The performers above median in social saw an average of more than five times as many “addicts” (visitors who come 30+ times per month) as a proportion of their audience, according to data from Quantcast, compared to those below the median; and they saw a corresponding reduction in their “passers-by” (visitors who come only once) by 16 percentage points. These patterns map overall into more than three times the visit frequency per audience member overall for these top performers. That’s three times the value per unique.
A Leading Indicator of Long-Term Success
One thing is clear from the growth trends of the social web: Those publishers that figure out how to capture and maintain a leadership position in social will win over the next decade. For Wetpaint, it’s a critical strategy for us to be a leader among the media industry. Which would make my mother very proud.
Speaking of which, in this debut month, my company Wetpaint came in #4, bested only by MTV, People, and ESPN. Not bad for a debut… we’ll be #1 within six months.
For those interested, detailed rankings of all Top 50 are included below.
| Rank | Name of Publisher (Owner) | URL | Monthly Uniques | % from Social |
| 1 | MTV | mtv.com | 17,101,841 | 14.3% |
| 2 | ESPN | espn.com | 33,242,207 | 13.7% |
| 3 | People | people.com | 12,671,101 | 13.2% |
| 4 | Wetpaint Entertainment | wetpaint.com | 2,532,044 | 12.4% |
| 5 | TMZ | tmz.com | 14,575,713 | 8.8% |
| 6 | Yahoo | yahoo.com | 172,269,418 | 8.6% |
| 7 | Patch (Aol) | patch.com | 10,610,327 | 8.6% |
| 8 | Major League Baseball | mlb.com | 15,552,415 | 7.9% |
| 9 | Aol | aol.com | 51,659,415 | 7.7% |
| 10 | Discovery Channel | discovery.com | 11,170,738 | 6.7% |
| 11 | Break Media | break.com | 9,166,220 | 6.3% |
| 12 | IGN (News Corp) | ign.com | 10,112,530 | 6.1% |
| 13 | Us Weekly | usmagazine.com | 10,970,162 | 5.9% |
| 14 | CNN | cnn.com | 56,595,377 | 5.3% |
| 15 | FOX News (News Corp) | foxnews.com | 26,900,038 | 5.0% |
| 16 | BBC News | bbc.co.uk | 14,863,384 | 4.8% |
| 17 | MSN | msn.com | 115,933,138 | 4.6% |
| 18 | Nickelodeon (MTV Networks) | nick.com | 10,716,354 | 4.6% |
| 19 | The New York Times | nytimes.com | 33,034,269 | 4.4% |
| 20 | MailOnline | dailymail.co.uk | 15,747,179 | 4.4% |
| 21 | IMDB (Amazon.com) | imdb.com | 39,778,499 | 4.4% |
| 22 | CBS Local | cbslocal.com | 11,039,512 | 4.4% |
| 23 | TIME | time.com | 10,024,132 | 4.2% |
| 24 | Cartoon Network (Turner) | cartoonnetwork.com | 10,794,764 | 4.2% |
| 25 | The Washington Post | washingtonpost.com | 17,818,260 | 4.1% |
| 26 | New York Daily News | nydailynews.com | 9,931,052 | 3.9% |
| 27 | The Guardian | guardian.co.uk | 10,283,648 | 3.8% |
| 28 | CBS News | cbsnews.com | 12,144,917 | 3.7% |
| 29 | Food Networks (Scripps) | foodnetwork.com | 14,324,933 | 3.5% |
| 30 | Allrecipes (Readers Digest) | allrecipes.com | 17,986,031 | 3.4% |
| 31 | The Huffington Post | huffingtonpost.com | 36,701,275 | 3.3% |
| 32 | TODAY / MSN (NBC/Microsoft) | today.com | 23,323,684 | 3.3% |
| 33 | Los Angeles Times (Tribune) | latimes.com | 18,618,265 | 3.2% |
| 34 | WebMD | webmd.com | 12,048,444 | 2.6% |
| 35 | The Wall Street Journal | wsj.com | 16,643,499 | 2.5% |
| 36 | Forbes | forbes.com | 12,356,124 | 2.4% |
| 37 | FOX Sports | foxsports.com | 18,346,185 | 2.2% |
| 38 | USA Today / Gannett | usatoday.com | 16,979,964 | 2.2% |
| 39 | Reuters | reuters.com | 12,726,776 | 2.2% |
| 40 | ABC News | abcnews.com | 19,876,129 | 2.1% |
| 41 | CNET (CBS Interactive) | cnet.com | 27,602,379 | 2.1% |
| 42 | Sports Illustrated (Time Inc.) | si.com | 9,304,012 | 2.1% |
| 43 | LIVESTRONG / (Demand Media) | livestrong.com | 9,650,128 | 2.0% |
| 44 | MSNBC Digital Network | msnbc.com | 44,198,985 | 1.9% |
| 45 | About.com / NY Times | about.com | 36,978,618 | 1.4% |
| 46 | Bloomberg | bloomberg.com | 10,592,480 | 1.4% |
| 47 | Mayo Clinic | mayoclinic.com | 10,944,436 | 1.1% |
| 48 | eHow (Demand Media) | ehow.com | 48,624,976 | 1.0% |
| 49 | ThePostGame | thepostgame.com | 12,017,913 | 0.9% |
| 50 | CNN Money | cnnmoney.com | 16,643,785 | N/A |
Source: Wetpaint.com analysis, comScore, Compete.com.