SAN FRANCISCO -Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use the Internet's most popular hangout 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 Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Facebook was responsible for 3 percent of traffic to the 21 news sites that allowed data to be tracked, according to the study's co-author, Amy Mitchell. Five of the sites studied got 6 percent to 8 percent of their readers from Facebook.
The referrals typically came from links posted by friends on Facebook's social-networking site or from the ubiquitous like buttons, which Facebook encourages other websites to place alongside their content.
The Facebook effect is small compared with Google's clout. Google Inc.'s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to Pew.
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 is at the forefront of this shift because it has more than 500 million worldwide users. That's far more than any other Internet service built for socializing and sharing.
See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/mxN6uk
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 Monday by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Facebook was responsible for 3 percent of traffic to the 21 news sites that allowed data to be tracked, according to the study's co-author, Amy Mitchell. Five of the sites studied got 6 percent to 8 percent of their readers from Facebook.
The referrals typically came from links posted by friends on Facebook's social-networking site or from the ubiquitous like buttons, which Facebook encourages other websites to place alongside their content.
The Facebook effect is small compared with Google's clout. Google Inc.'s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to Pew.
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 is at the forefront of this shift because it has more than 500 million worldwide users. That's far more than any other Internet service built for socializing and sharing.
See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/mxN6uk
