WASHINGTON – Presidential election coverage historically has been good for WND, and 2008 has been no exception.
Viewer traffic has steadily risen in the last five months, with the site now attracting more than 8 million visitors per month.
In June, WND attracted 6.8 million visitors. That rose to 6.9 million in July. In August, the total traffic was up to 7.4 million. September brought 8.8 million to the site. So far, in October, more than 8.1 million viewers have already visited WND, according to internal trafficking reports.
Neilsen Online reported last April that WND ranks among the top 25 news websites in both unique visitors and sessions per user, according to March statistics.
Nielsen reported an increase of 12.3 percent in unique visitors to newspaper-based websites over last year.
Nevertheless, according to other data, WND – founded in 1997 as "an online newspaper" – is topped in traffic by only three U.S. newspapers: The New York Times, USA Today and the Washington Post.
Nielsen Online does not count actual traffic on individual websites, but relies on estimates of visitors based on projections and data it gathers from hundreds of thousands of monitoring stations. According to Nielsen, the Drudge Report led all news sites in sessions per user with 19.1. Fox News was second with 8.0, followed by: AOL News 7.8, Daily Kos 7.7, Yahoo! News 7.7, CNN 7.4, MSNBC 5.9, KSL 5.6, New York Times 5.5, Gannett Newspapers 5.4, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 5.2, Google News 5.2, Star Tribune 5.1, St. Louis Post Dispatch 5.1, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 5.1, Zwire 4.8, Netscape 4.7, The Atlantic 4.3, Breitbart 4.1, GTGI Network 4.1, IB Web Sites 4.1, WorldNow 4.0, WorldNetDaily 4.0, Washington Post 3.9, Cox Newspapers 3.8, Media General Newspapers 3.8, Gannett Broadcasting 3.7, Tribune-Review Online 3.7, Hearst Newspapers Digital 3.7, Townhall 3.6.
Based on unique visitors, Nielsen breaks down news site traffic rankings as follows: CNN, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, AOL News, New York Times, Gannett Newspapers (USA Today), Google News, Fox News, Washington Post, WorldNow, Heart Newspapers, IB Web Sites, Gannett Broadcasting, Cox Newspapers, Drudge Report, Breitbart, Netscape, Media General Newspapers, Star Tribune, GTGI Network, Townhall, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, WorldNetDaily, Zwire, Daily Kos, St. Louis Post Dispatch, The Atlantic, KSL, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Tribune-Review.
"It's important to understand Nielsen numbers don't reflect the actual traffic websites experience," explained Joseph Farah, founder and chief executive officer of WND. "However, the numbers are somewhat helpful for comparison purposes. WND's actual monthly traffic is about five times larger than Nielsen estimates based on its sampling."
Farah added that WND's traffic continues to skyrocket in its 11th year in business.
"We won't rest until we're No. 1 in all categories," said Farah. "And even then we won't rest."
WND is known as a trendsetting Internet content company. It was the first to launch a book publishing line – WND Books. With the acquisition in January of World Ahead Media, WND Books becomes the first Internet content company to own its own book-publishing company.
WND, the leading independent Internet news source, is known for being first. It was honored as "the most popular website in the world" by the now-defunct European-based Global 100 ranking service, a website that allowed users to rank their favorite destinations on the Net, music groups, TV shows, movies, etc. In fact, WND remained No. 1 for nearly 100 weeks in a row – an indication it has "the most loyal and passionate readers," said Farah.
WND has also been consistently ranked by several major Internet ratings agencies as the "stickiest" news site on the Internet – meaning readers average more time on it than any other.
By WND's own traffic counts, the site attracts about 6 million "unique visitors" (meaning different people) every month. It attracts between 50 million and 60 million pageviews per month.
WND was also the first Internet content site to launch a daily, nationally syndicated radio show, "Farah Live," based on that content. And WND was the first content site on the Net to launch columnists into weekly syndication, including Chuck Norris, David Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Joseph Farah.
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