See update below.
Has it come to this: The hottest thing at Yahoo now is an idea stolen from AOL?
Seeking Alpha looks at the traffic for gossip sites and finds that OMG!, a new Yahoo site, has more visitors than TMZ, from AOL, or E! Online.
The reason seems to be that Yahoo has been giving OMG very heavy promotion on its home page. Why? It’s not clear, but boosting the numbers in advance of some ad deal would be a smart move. Or maybe, in a more benign explanation, it is to get people to try the site so they come back on their own.
But will they? OMG looks good with big photos. But nearly all its content comes from Access Hollywood, wire services and other partners.
TMZ has set the gossip world on its head because its staff of young reporters, organized by veteran celeb watcher Harvey Levin, actually breaks news by tailing celebrities, usually after they weave out of a Sunset Strip bar without underwear.
Maybe it is the bias of a writer, but it seems like people who actually have something new to say will ultimately have the credibility and the traffic.
(Mistype the URL for OMG! as OMG.com, by the way, and it directs you to a computer industry consortium, Object Management Group, that develops enterprise integration standards. No drunk stars here.)
Update: Seeking Alpha based its report on Compete, a Web measurement firm. I generally think Compete’s methodology is not as good at getting a representative sample as Comscore and Nielsen NetRatings. I asked Comscore for their version of the same numbers. They showed that in August, TMZ still had more users than OMG, but Yahoo’s site certainly did surge over the summer. OMG had 4.1 million visitors in June, 8.7 million in July and 8.0 in August. In August, TMZ had 9.5 million. People.com (also a Time Warner property as TMZ is) was ranked third, with 6.7 million visitors.
Based on minutes per user, however, the ranking is reversed. In August, users in the United States spent 27.8 minutes on People, 12.3 minutes on TMZ and 6.2 minutes on OMG.
Comments are no longer being accepted.