Since CNN parent Turner Broadcasting Corp. paid $750,000 to acquire the domain iReport.com in early 2008 with the goal of turning it into a YouTube for news, the site has grown into a portal whose audience demographic more or less mirrors that of its much larger, more conventional counterpart CNN.com.
According to Quantcast, the greatest percentage of iReport’s audience (like that of CNN.com) consists of educated white males earning over $100,000 per year and visit the site an average of once per month (fewer repeat visitors than CNN). All content on the site is user-generated, and while some of the stories submitted by users are picked up for use by CNN, most are not. Despite heavy promotion on CNN’s cable news channel, iReport currently receives only around 1 million visitors per month, compared with more than 27 million for CNN.com.
The site’s design takes its cues from YouTube and other popular Web 2.0 sites, featuring a list of topical videos, along with their associated tags and popularity, and the above-the-fold navigation for topics relies on a tag cloud rather than the traditional horizontal or vertical nav bar. The site is fairly easy to navigate – a ‘breadcrumb’ trail makes it easy to backtrack – and content, which is almost exclusively video, is well-labeled. The design is professional but the site’s focus on user uploads gives it a slightly different look and feel than most news sites. Advertising is minimal.
As a user-generated site, content is constantly updated and interactivity is built into the site’s design concept, but accuracy is far less reliable than might be assumed for a traditional news Web site. A prominent disclaimer at the top of the page warns that submissions are “not edited, fact-checked or screened” before posting.
February 17, 2009 at 1:32 pm |
Although I’ve heard of the site, I’ve never visted it. Perhaps, it’s because I’m not a white male making over $100,000. So the news on the site is user-generated only? Grade=check+