A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism traced traffic to 25 US news websites using Nielsen figures, and found search still dominant but social recommendation gaining fast. Google accounted for roughly 30 per cent of traffic to news sites. Facebook was responsible for about 3 per cent of visits overall — but for five of the sites it was already the second or third most popular driver.
“Facebook is beginning to join Google as one of the most influential players in driving news audiences,” the study said, adding that if searching for news was the most important development of the previous decade, sharing news might be among the most important of the next.
Twitter, by contrast, “barely registers as a referring source”, accounting for less than one per cent of traffic. The Los Angeles Times was the exception, taking more visits from Twitter than Facebook — 3.5 per cent against just over 2 per cent. Pew also judged that social recommendation tools on stories had paid off: clicks away from the site, but positive ones likely to multiply traffic back to it.
The findings matched a Canadian Media Research Consortium survey published the week before, in which 43 per cent of social media users got some daily news from recommendations by friends and family — around 6.5 million Canadians. It also found readers preferred news from friends over news from a journalist or organisation, and that close to two-thirds valued easy sharing tools, rising to 83 per cent among young Canadians.