I remember all the fuss generated by blog and news aggregator sites and wanted to check out how the most popular ones have been doing the last couple of years. Here are some interesting stats from Alexa.com (I wish Alexa could compile monthly averages like Compete.com does -- but Compete.com does not allow non-Pro users to access the 2-year statistics!)... Here are some stats for blog aggregator/search engine site Technorati.com:

You may have to click on the graphic to make it more visible. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't appear to handle higher-resolution images that well...

Interestingly enough, traffic and reach have come down from the start of 2008 and have bottomed out in 2009. Seems that the exponential rise of many of these sites have recently been checked -- I guess it explains why I haven't heard much about them recently. Interestingly, it looks like those who have remained have, on average, spent a longer time on the site (about 33% longer), even though they are not looking at more pages. One could hypothesize that 2009 was a year where a good portion of the less-engaged winnowed themselves out of Technorati.

Another popular site a few years ago was Newsgator.com -- the news RSS aggregator site:

I would have expected Newsgator to be a more popular application than Technorati -- but it receives about a magnitude of 10 less traffic. I'm probably surprised because I'm part of that dwindling population that still rely on traditional media outlets versus Blogs for information. Furthermore -- almost every single Blog is now an RSS Feed, so the fact that one "aggregates Blogs" and the other "aggregates news" is pretty meaningless now

Interestingly, there was a large infusion of traffic into Newsgator at the start of 2009 -- so the traffic on the site is trending upwards (essentially doubling this year). Unfortunately, it's been characterized by a "less engaged" audience -- average time on the site has dropped by 66% from 6 to 2 minutes in mid 2009.

These are still pretty low percentages -- people still by and large gravitate towards their favorite news sites. Sites like CNN.com, FoxNews.com, NYTimes.com and WSJ.com still reach 0.2 (for WSJ.com) to 2% (for cnn.com) of internet users, compared to Newsgator's trifling .01% (in other words, Newsgator.com reaches only 5% of WSJ.com's traffic)