Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use the Internet's most popular social media tool to share and recommend content.
That's one of the key findings from a study on the flow of traffic to the Web's 25 largest news destinations. The study was released May 9 by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The study, an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company, examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas 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.
Overall, the findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.
The Facebook effect is small compared with Google's clout.
Google remains the dominant source that drives people to the respective news sites. According to
Pew, this search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites. But
Facebook, with its “like” button, ranked as the second-or third-highest referral source for six of the largest 25 news sites including
Huffingtonpost.com, which gets the biggest piece of the Facebook pie at 8% of their visitors coming to their site via Facebook.
But Facebook and other sharing tools, such as
Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content. By contrast, Google uses an automated formula to help people find news.
Facebook with 500-plus million worldwide users, is at the forefront of this shift.
"If searching for the news was the most important development of the last decade, sharing the news may be among the most important of the next," the Pew report said.
Twitter does not play aprominent role in directing people to the respective news sites. Major news sites, however, are getting less than 1 percent of their traffic from Twitter, even though it had about 175 million accounts last year.
Twitter, the Pew Report statest that is “barely registers as a referring source” in terms of sending people to news sites.
Conversely,
The Drudge Report, which surely doesn’t get the same attention and publicity that Twitter does, is a far more significant traffic source for news sites than Twitter, according to the Pew study.
The Pew report is based on an analysis of Internet traffic data compiled by the research firm Nielsen Co. during the first nine months of last year.
Read online: Navigating news online: Where people go, how they get there and what lures them away, by Kenny Olmstead, Amy Mitchell and Tom Rosenstiel at www.journalism.org
Excerpts from the article below
Whatever the future of journalism, much of it depends on understanding the ways that people navigate the digital news environment—the behavior of what might be called the new news consumer.
Despite the unprecedented level of data about what news people consume online and how they consume it, understanding these new metrics has often proven elusive. The statistics are complicated, sometimes contradictory, and often introduce new information whose meaning is not clear.
To shed more light on Web news behavior, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted an in-depth study of detailed audience statistics from the Nielsen Company. The study examines the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, delving deeply into four main areas 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.
Overall, the findings suggest that there is not one group of news consumers online but several, each of which behaves differently. These differences call for news organizations to develop separate strategies to serve and make money from each audience.
The findings also reveal that while search aggregators remain the most popular way users find news, the universe of referring sites is diverse. Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic. And far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites.
What users do with news content, the study also suggests, could significantly influence the economics of the news industry. Understanding not only what content users will want to consume but also what content they are likely to pass along may be a key to how stories are put together and even what stories get covered in the first place.
Among the findings:
• Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on “casual users,” people who visit just a few times per month and spend only a few minutes at a site over that time span. USAToday.com was typical of most of these popular news sites: 85% of its users visited USAToday.com between one and three times per month. Three quarters came only once or twice.
Time spent was even more daunting: When all the visits were added together, fully a third of users, 34%, spent between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month. Even if, as some suggest, online data tend to count some users multiple times, inflating the number of casual users and undercounting repeat visits, casual users till would be the largest single group.
• There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly, from as high as 18% (at
CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at
BingNews.com).
• Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.
• Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.
• When it comes to the age, news consumers to the top news websites are on par with Internet users overall. This stands apart from news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to skew older, and may bode well for the industry.
All of this suggests that news organizations might need a layered and complex strategy for serving audiences and also for monetizing them. They may need, for instance, to develop one way to serve casual users and another way for power users. They may decide it makes sense to try to convert some of those in the middle to visit more often. Or they may try to make some of their loyal audience stay longer by creating special content. Advertising may help monetize some groups, while subscriptions will work for others. And the strategy that works best for each site may differ.
Which news providers make it in among the top 25 for total U.S. traffic?
While the raw figures for visitors vary from one metrics firm to the next (Nielsen’s unique visitors numbers are often much smaller than those of the ratings agency comScore, for example, and both rely mainly on home-based traffic rather than work-based, which may undercount total news consumption) the list and rank of top sites remains relatively consistent across measuring companies.
Specifically:
• Eleven are newspaper websites: The New York Times (nyt.com), Washington Post (washingtonpost.com), USA Today (usatoday.com), Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), LA Times (latimes.com), New York Daily News (nydailynews.com), New York Post (nypost.com), Boston Globe (Boston.com), San Francisco Chronicle (sfgate.co), The Chicago Tribune (ChicagoTribune.com) and the British Daily Mail (mail.co.uk).
• Six are broadcast network television or cable news sites: MSNBC (msnbc.com), CNN (cnn.com), ABC News (abcnews.go.com), Fox News (foxnews.com), CBS News (cbsnews.com) and BBC News (bbc.co.uk).
• One is a wire service news site: Reuters (reuters.com).
• Three are hybrid online-only sites, which do a mix of aggregation and original reporting: Yahoo News (news.yahoo.com), AOL News (news.aol.com) and Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com).
• Four are pure news aggregators: Google News (news.google.com), The Examiner (examiner.com), Topix (topix.com) and Bing News (news.bing.com).
The list from another main Web traffic firm, Hitwise, is nearly identical – it contains nearly the same mix of properties. The same is true, though it sometimes groups families of sites differently, of comScore’s list.