Affinity for and Credibility of US Websites

01/11

A recent study of US portal channels and content websites, from the Online Publishers Association, comScore Networks and Millward Brown determined that 47% of US internet users have a “high affinity” for portals and 56% display a high affinity for content websites.

US internet users taken from comScore’s 1.5 million-member panel were intercepted with surveys as they visited selected websites. Millward Brown developed an index, based on a scale from one to 100 with 100 indicating the highest level, for respondents’ affinity for the certain sites. Affinity was ranked on attitudes and loyalty measures including attitudes toward ads on the site and the predisposition to buy branded products. Of the 4,980 respondents, 58% displayed a high affinity for financial news sites, like cbsmarketwatch.com and wsj.com, and 53% showed a high affinity for sports content sites like espn.com and sportingnews.com.

Yahoo! Finance and AOL Financial News were the financial news portals for which 49% of respondents displayed an affinity.

Also published this month, “How Do People Evaluate a Website’s Credibility,” from the Persuasive Technology Lab of Stanford University and Consumer Webwatch, publisher of Consumer Reports, indicates that 46.1% of people in the US cited aspects of a website’s design in reference to its credibility. Additionally, 28.5% referenced different aspects of a website’s information design and/or structure and about 25% cited qualities relating to the focus of the information presented.(segue)