During the first quarter, the online health information category grew 12% over the same period last year. This represents 55.3 million monthly U.S. visitors, or 31 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience, according to data from comScore.

While the traditional players - WebMD, MSN and Yahoo! continued to lead the category, smaller players are gaining traction. Healthline.com traffic rose 269 percent, while QualityHealth.com jumped 114 percent. Recent entrant RevolutionHealth.com has doubled its traffic since the beginning of the year to 486k visitors in March.

comScore data also reveals a high degree of user loyalty for the health portals, as evidenced by the low degree of cross-visitation that occurs within the category.

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