Posted in Website Design Tips	April 11, 2007

Celebrity news sites are making gains on the Mequoda Blog 100 with content added several times an hour.

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Editor, Mequoda Group LLC

The February results are in for the Mequoda Blog 100, our list of the top 100 media blogs in the US. Tech-blog Engadget dropped from the top five, leaving it mostly to entertainment news blogs, and there are ten new additions to the list.

Celebrity news vortex TMZ is still number one and has gained in every category except page-views per visitor, which dropped from 17.0 to 16.8—hardly a slip. Its 3.38 million unique visitors for the month were enough to beat number two USA Today by over 1.64 million.

The blog of the most widely circulated newspaper in the country, USA Today, maintained the number two spot and had a 451,035 surge in unique visitors, bringing its total to over 1.7 million for February, just over half of TMZ’s.

Other than USAToday and number five glumbert.com, the top five blogs on the list are based on entertainment news. The AOL and Telepictures Productions creation TMZ is gaining in news credibility as it grows in unique visitor counts, but PerezHilton.com and The Superficial are much more raw in their images and commentary on the stars.

Aside from topic, the big three entertainment news blogs have two other commonalities: frequently updated content and rising unique visitor counts. All three add content throughout the day with loads of images and juicy gossip, which brings users to the sites again and again.

Every publisher should appreciate how much traffic this constant content format generates. Users are more inclined to frequent a site with fresh content every half hour. As they come, they bring more opportunities for publishers and they increase advertising inventory that can be sold to sponsors on a CPM, CPC or a CPA basis.

The Mequoda Research Team has analyzed more than 2,000 media websites and identified what types of websites, like blogs, generate the most traffic and boost revenue. We detail them in our Generating Website Revenue 2007 special report and also tell publishers how to develop a website network that turns their niche topics into online revenue machines.

Mequoda Group and Compete, a marketing research firm that provides premium web analytics to marketers and consumers, developed the Mequoda Blog 100 based on monthly unique visitor counts, aggregating multiple-blog sites across the publication. Mequoda Group and Compete will be continually monitoring over 300 of America's most popular media blogs and reporting the monthly results to our readers.

If you know of or publish a media blog that you feel should be monitored by Mequoda, please email it to Blog100@mequoda.com for addition to our database.

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