A little over a month ago, msnbc.com celebrated its first anniversary as America's #1 news site. According to Nielsen Online, the MSNBC Digital Network (msnbc.com) experienced record-breaking traffic for the past twelve months, with May marking a full year of dominance in the online news space.

"The success of msnbc.com is the result of a remarkable collaborative effort by some of the most innovative journalists in the business," said NBC News President Steve Capus. "These extraordinary numbers prove that if you provide your audience with quality journalism, offer it in a compelling, easy to use way and make it timely and accessible, they will respond."

Yahoo! News ranked #2, with 35 million unique visitors and the CNN Digital Network ranked #3, with 33.4 million unique users, said Nielsen Online.

Msnbc.com's average monthly total of unique visitors also outpaced (by more than 3.3 million monthly visitors per month) the combined total of Fox News Digital Network (FoxNews.com), the ABCNEWS Digital Network (ABCNews.com) and the CBS News Digital Network (CBSNews.com).

Msnbc.com is the news provider for MSN and is powered by NBC News. As the exclusive online channel for NBC News, msnbc.com features some of America's top-rated newscasts including "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," America's number-one evening newscast, according to the MSNBC Press Release.

Nightly.msnbc.com, the home for "Nightly News with Brian Williams," increased video streams by 24% from January through May, versus that same time period in 2008.

"TODAY," is the number-one morning news program, and "Meet the Press," stands as the most-watched Sunday morning public affairs program for the first quarter of 2009. May was TODAYshow.com's biggest month ever, getting close to the 8 million unique visitors mark for the first time. Msnbc.com had more than 37.2 million uniques last month. Msnbc.com also features programming from "NBC Sports," "Dateline" and MSNBC TV.

It is always refreshing to be reminded of newsroom and news network's sucesses. In these times of ecomonic gloom and doom, are there lessons to be learned from the trends and behaviours of MSNBC?

Source: Mediabistro, WebNewser