A level of familiarity with the target audience can help online marketers to deliver advertisements more effectively, it has been suggested.

Internet industry analyst comScore explains that individuals who fall into certain categories online tend to display similar characteristics in other areas.

Latest research from the firm focuses on the application of such a theory within the online news sector.

According to comScore, heavy consumers of online news - defined as being the top 20 per cent of users who most frequently access web-based articles - engage more with certain topic areas elsewhere on the internet.

They are twice as likely to research finances and jobs online and three times as likely to look up politics on the web, comScore asserts.

Jack Flanagan, executive vice-president of comScore, notes that online articles are boosting readership figures of many newspapers, with 44 per cent of the UK population reading news on the internet in March.

Meanwhile, comScore recently reported that heavy users of online news are typically less likely to read the print equivalent of any given publication than their peers.