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 delivery 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 1999, and serves content on behalf of a large majority of the world's leading online news portals. Distributing over one billion 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 PC users (and increasing numbers of cell phone and other PDA users) are online consuming news.

Following is an explanation of how we measure visitors / minute:

KEY

V/M = measures current millions of visitors 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 visitors per minute for that time of day, and day of week, within each geographic region
* for each minute, Akamai is measuring the number of visitors that viewed a page or more from news sites during that minute