Direct Visitors Are the Gold Standard for News Websites

According to new data published by the Pew Research Center, direct visitors to news websites are much more engaged than those coming from search engines or social networks. While the latter two may be indispensable for news websites to be discovered in the first place, those (returning) readers that have a site bookmarked or consciously type in its address are the ones who are truly valuable to online publishers.

Description

This chart shows engagement metrics for visitors of newspaper websites coming from different sources.

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Top news and media websites among Internet users in the United States in December 2014, by percent of visits
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Leading newspapers in the United States in January 2015, by number of unique visitors (in millions)
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When you access the news via news aggregators, online social media or search engines, what do you most often do?
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Number of monthly unique visitors to newspaper websites in the United States from March 2014 to August 2015 (in millions)
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Leading global English-language news websites in the United States in January 2026, by monthly visits (in millions)
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News sources paid most attention to when using social networks for news in the United States as of February 2021

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