According to data from Hitwise, Yahoo News was the news site with the most election day traffic, followed by CNN, MSNBC, Google News, Fox News and the Drudge report.

Here’s a list of the top 10 election news sites, in terms of Hitwise’s estimate of market share:

1. Yahoo News
2. CNN
3. MSNBC
4. Google News
5. FOXNews
6. Drudge Report
7. The New York Times
8. FOXNews.com Elections
9. USA Today
10. ABCnews.com

Source: Erick Schonfeld, “Hitwise Ranks Election Traffic To News Sites,” TechCrunch, November 5, 2008

Google has struck a multi-year deal with NBC Universal to sell inventory on a number of NBC cable stations.

Under the arrangement, Google will sell ads on Sci Fi, Oxygen, MSNBC, CNBC and other networks. It will also partner with NBC Universal to develop new ad metrics and assess viewership data acquired from set top boxes (available under Google’s relationship with EchoStar’s DISH network).

Source: Zachary Rodgers, “Google Partners with NBC Universal on TV Ads”, The ClickZ Network, September 9, 2008

According to the New York Times if there is one dark spot in Google’s quest to dominate just about everything online, it’s news. While Google News had approximately 11.4 million users in May, it was the eighth-ranked news site, far behind the first-ranked Yahoo News site, which had, according to Nielsen Online, 35.8 million visitors.

Meanwhile, the growth in visitors to Google News was, in the last two years, just 10 percent - much slower than the growth in visitors to the other major news sites, notably second-ranked MSNBC.com which added 10.4 million users and grew by 42 percent in the last two years, and CNN.com and nytimes.com which grew even faster.

Google News was launched 6 years ago, but with no ads on display, has no obvious monetization model. Google has said, however, that attracting traffic is not its chief objective. Of greater importance is delivering improved search results and helping users find news, and news sources, they might not otherwise know about.

Unlike the other main news sites, Google uses an algorithm to aggregate news, rather than human editors to license, choose or edit content. Google News displays news in a list of links, which users click on to read elsewhere. The other main news aggregators (for example, Yahoo and AOL) and original news sites (for example, CNN.com and MSNBC.com) display the complete articles, aiming to keep visitors on their websites.

Yet, while Google may aim - with apparently altruistic motives - to expose and direct visitors to more diverse news sources, it may not ultimately be the kind of destination that news consumers want. For one thing, it trails far behind the other major news sites in terms of providing interactive and multimedia features. For example, Yahoo News delivers around 200 million videos and 800 million photos each month.

Nevertheless, while Google News may not hold as much appeal for news consumers as the other main news sites, it still gets a helluva lot of visitors each month. And the fact that it is algorithm driven may be advantageous to Internet marketers. Presumably, an algorithm is more objective and likely to pick up news on a given marketer’s website than is a subjective human editor.

Source: Miguel Helft, “At Google, Slow Growth in News Site”, The New York Times, June 24, 2007