A new study from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that social media, Facebook in particular, is on track to become a powerful source of the one of most important things to an online media outlet: eyeballs.
Researchers at the Pew Center, using statistics from the Nielsen Company, examined the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States and aspects of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites; how long they stay during each visit; how deep they go into a site; and where they go when they leave.
The study shows that, though search engines continue to be a primary source of traffic for news sites, social media as a referral source is growing. Facebook, with its intricate web of social networks, dominates as a referral source. For example, at five of the top sites profiled, Facebook was the second or third most important driver of traffic.
In an interesting twist, chatty Twitter doesn't appear to be such a significant driver of traffic -- researchers said it barely registered as a referring source. However, the “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.
The study suggests that, while searching for news may be the most important development of the last decade, sharing news may be the most important in the next.
The study shows that 40 percent of a news organization's traffic comes from outside sources, with Google accounting for 30 percent of that outside traffic. In 2010 Facebook, with its nearly 600 million members worldwide, became a critical player in the news.
On the high end of the spectrum the Huffington Post derived 8 percent of its traffic from Facebook links, while the New York Times received 6 percent. AOLNews, MSNBC and Topix were on the low end, with 1 percent of their traffic coming from Facebook.
By Aislyn Greene
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