The Akamai Net Usage Index is the world's first and only daily Web traffic benchmark that tracks where news is being consumed on a global basis. Akamai, as the content and application acceleration platform for more than 100 global news portal companies, has a unique view into the daily Web traffic of major news sites. Akamai has been in business since 1998, and serves content on behalf of a large majority of the world's leading online news portals. Distributing billions of page views daily for these news information sites, Akamai is in the unique position to be able to track news consumption on a global scale. At any point in time, millions of Internet users are online consuming news.

Following is an explanation of how we measure page views per minute:

KEY

V/M = measures current millions of page views per minute* to aggregate news sites (this number reflects the current rate in each geographic region)

% = measures the percent above or below the average of page views per minute for that time of day, and day of week, within each geographic region, based on an 8-week average (with data points taken at 5 minute > intervals)

* for each minute, Akamai is measuring the number of page views from news sites during that minute