Believe it or not, there's no definitive ranking of media properties on the web. The latest list of top news sites put together by Editor & Publisher is ridiculously newspaper-centric and makes use of Nielsen's notoriously erratic pageview numbers (rather than the monthly visitor numbers that advertisers instead rely on).
Nielsen's own news and information rankings include miscellaneous weather and directory sites. Neither includes entertainment sites such as People.com. So I've taken the media research outfit's latest audience numbers for the top 50 online properties—whether they're brands that began in print (gray), on television or radio (dark gray) or are native to the internet (red). It's as good a guide as we have to the new media landscape.
Conclusions? First of all, internet-born properties such as Yahoo! News, The Huffington Post and Gawker Media—with 14 of the top 50 properties—do not dominate.
Second: television—with 20 of the top 50—is holding its own. Sure, TV networks have a smaller share of the online audience than they do of all media consumption; but they have a future.
Third, no surprise, newspapers and magazines are struggling. They have 16 in the top tier—but it's astonishing that established print giants such as Cox Newspapers and Time Inc haven't yet squashed the internet insurgents with which they compete in these rankings.
Nick Denton is the CEO of Gawker Media. This post is reprinted with his permission from nickdenton.org.
