A growing number of Germans prefer the internet to traditional sources such as radio, tv and print media in order to inform themselves. The 20 German news portals attracting most visitors such as for example the Focus and Spiegel online portals were visited almost 2.4 billion times over the first half of this year, as was reported by the German Association for Information Management, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM).
This corresponds to 27.7% more visits as compared to the first six months in 2007. Over the past four years the number of visitors has even doubled. According to BITKOM this year 22% of those aged between 16 and 74 years will be using onlin news portals. In this respect Germany is about average in Europe. Leading are Finland and Estonia where 50% of the population read news on the internet.
This boom is in particular driven by those news portals which inform on a large range of topics. Among the top 20 sites, however, there are also several which concentrate on special interest topics such as sports or computers. Also popular are the internet versions of regional newspapers. What all these sites have in common is their free access.
Comment by mittelstandswiki: the increasing number of visitors to our site and in particlar to this news section not only confirm these positive figures published by BITKOM, but the number of our visitors has been increasing even more than the average of the top 20 portals mentioned. And this of course is very good news. 