Celebrity news sites remain more popular than ever as the public’s fascination with the latest gossip continues to see growth. Nielsen//NetRatings select sample of 19-celebrity gossip Web sites finds that audience growth increased 40 percent year over year in February.
While gossip sites are seeing more traffic, visitors are also devouring more content with total Web page views increasing 108 percent during the same time period.
According to Nielsen//NetRatings reality TV and the continual obsession with celebrities has made the Web one of the best places to find the latest information and gossip. They attribute the popularity of these sites to the timely updates they provide and forums where fans can express their views on the latest gossip news.
AOL’s TMZ.com, which broke both the Mel Gibson drunk driving fallout and the Michael Richards on stage meltdown, had 7.9 million unique visitors in February 2007. This was a 151 percent increase over February 2006.
People.com saw a 93 percent increase year over year and had a unique audience of 4.3 million last month. E! Online had 3.3 million unique visitors in February and grew 9 percent year over year.
Also making the top five gossip sites for February were Perezhilton.com with 2.4 million unique visitors and EW.com with 2.1 million visitors.
The sad saga of “Anna Nicole Smith” was the 8th most searched term in February with 6.2 million searches and was the top search term celebrity related. The troubled “Britney Spears” had 3.6 million queries beating out American Idol contestant “Antonella Barba” by a hair who had 2.1 million search queries during the month.
