Most Popular Online News Stories for 2011

It’s that time of year, again, when news organizations are scrambling to determine which stories and screaming headlines attracted the most attention from its readers.

As a way to get the ball rolling, I contacted some leading news organizations and asked them to provide the online story that generated the most page views on their Web Sites over the last year.

Here, then, are the responses that came back from those organizations considerate enough to return my emails.

• The New York Times: The story with the most page views on NYTimes.com between January 1 through Dec 5, 2011 was ``Sustainable Love'' By Tara Parker-Pope, an essay on what makes a happy marriage. The article appeared in the Times' print edition on January 2, 2011.

• The Wall Street Journal:  The most popular story at WSJ.com for 2011 was an essay entitled: ``Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior’’ which were excerpts from author Amy Chua’s new book: ``Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother", a book that caused a great deal of controversy earlier this year.

• New York Daily News: The most popular story of the year on NYDailyNews.com was a story about a Brooklyn Housing Authority worker killing a giant rat with a pitchfork. The article, according to Editor-in-chief Kevin Convey, generated 907,057 page views since it was published in August.

• CNN: The biggest traffic day at CNN was their first day of coverage (March 11th) of the earthquake in Japan.  According to a CNN spokesperson, CNN.com generated 135.9 million page views throughout the day.

• FOX News: At FoxNews.com, their most viewed story as of December 5, 2011 was a story about American socialite and reality television star Kim Kardashian being placed on an official Australian Immigration Department watch list after breaching her visa application as many as three times.

• NBC: At MSNBC.com, the top online video story of the year was the earthquake and tsunami in Japan  which generated more than 40 million online video streams in one day, setting an all-time one day site record, according to an MSNBC spokesperson.

• ABC: According a company spokesperson, the top story for 2011 on ABCNews.com was a story about the 50 most popular women on the Internet. The article was originally published on May 6, 2010.  The two other top stories for 2011 at ABCNews.com was the killing of Osama bin Laden published on May 1, 2011; and the obituary of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs , published on October 5, 2011.

• At TVNewser, one of 16 blogs at mediabistro.com,  their number one story of the year (so far) was a report about Jared Loughner, the suspect in the shooting of Arizona U.S. Congresswoman, Gabrielle Dee "Gabby" Giffords

• The most viewed story at FBI.gov for 2011 with more than 1.4 million page views was their posting about the murder of 41-year-old Ricky McCormick whose dead body was dumped in a field in St. Louis. Police found two encrypted notes stuffed into the victim's pockets, but have been unable to break the code, which remains a mystery to this day.

• ESPN:  According to an ESPN.com spokesperson, their most popular story to date was an article first published on January 13, 2011 about New York Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie unleashing a battery of harsh words for New England Patriots quarterback, Tom Brady. 

• The most widely read story at TechCrunch.com. a leading technology media property,  was a story about the new Facebook Timeline on September 22, 2011. The posting generated 1, 201, 589 page views according to John Briggs, editor of TechCurnch Gadgets. The second most popular story at TechCrunch for the year was news of Steve Jobs resignation as CEO of Apple on August 24, 2011, a breaking news story which generated 847,889 page views.

• According to a company spokesperson, the most popular television show, not necessarily this year, but of all time at Hulu.com is ``Family Guy’’,Fox’s American animated television series created by Seth MacFarlane.

• Finally, at Nexis, a subscription-based database that offers a comprehensive collection of news, public records, and legal and business information- tells me that they were unable to reveal their top search terms for the entire year; but they were kind enough to disclose their top 100 search terms for the past three months. Nexis provided me the results in alphabetical order, so they are not rank-ordered or listed by the most popular.

Another thing to keep in mind about these results is that Nexis, due to confidentiality concerns, doesn’t archive search strategies from its customers; so these results are based on the most used LexisNexis SmartIndexing terms.  SmartIndexing is the company’s own classification (or taxonomy) of subjects, industries, geographic areas, people and companies.

100 Most Popular searches over the past 90 days from LexisNexis.

1.) AAA
2.) ACLU
3.) Afghan conflict
4.) Africa
5.) Amanda Knox
6.) American Enterprise Institute
7.) Americans for Tax Reform
8.) Americans with Disabilities
9.) Anderson Cooper
10.) Antitrust
11.) Asset Management
12.) ATV
13.) Biometrics
14.) Black Friday
15.) Brookings Institute
16.) Center for American Progress
17.) Central America
18.) China
19.) Church sexual abuse
20.) Climate Change
21.) Columbia University
22.) Commercial Construction
23.) Congress
24.) Corporate Malfeasance
25.) Credit Watch Agencies
26.) Criminal Justice
27.) Cyber Security
28.) Debates
29.) Disney
30.) Employee Benefits
31.) Employment
32.) Energy Recycling
33.) Engine Technology
34.) Equity Markets
35.) Executive Moves
36.) Food Contamination
37.) Food Industry
38.) Food Insecurity
39.) Greece
40.) Health Savings Accounts
41.) Healthcare
42.) Heritage Foundation
43.) Herman Cain
44.) Hopstop
45.) Human Rights
46.) Illegal Immigration
47.) Income Trends
48.) India
49.) Insurance
50.) Ira conflict
51.) Iran
52.) Iraq
53.) Islamic extremism
54.) Israel
55.) Japan Economy
56.) Jimmy Fallon
57.) Job Creation
58.) Layoffs
59.) Mexico
60.) MF Global
61.) Michael Bloomberg
62.) Motorcycle
63.) Mutual Fund Market
64.) Net Neutrality
65.) NHL
66.) North Korea
67.) Nuclear
68.) Obama
69.) Occupy Wall Street
70.) Olympics
71.) Organized Crime
72.) Pakistan
73.) Payroll Processing
74.) Persian Gulf States
75.) Political Violence
76.) Private Equity Markets
77.) Railway Infrastructure
78.) Reinsurance
79.) Religion and Environmental Policy
80.) Religious Bigotry
81.) Retail Industry
82.) Rick Perry
83.) Romania
84.) Romney
85.) Sales Compensation
86.) Sandusky
87.) Schumer
88.) Scientology
89.) Sean Hannity
90.) Securities Markets
91.) Social Security
92.) Solyndra
93.) Steel
94.) Steve Jobs
95.) Tax policy
96.) Teach for America
97.) Terrorism
98.) Tim Kaine
99.) Tribal governance
100.) Turkish politics

Source: LexisNexis® Business Insight Solutions

-Bill Lucey
[email protected]
December 7, 2011

 

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