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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America

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Facebook Largest News Reader?

February 03, 2010

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web had an interesting piece suggesting that Facebook could become the world's leading news reader. A recent Facebook company blog entry encouraged members to set up a news feed on Facebook. Kirkpatrick contends that with a few tweeks, Facebook could become a major distribution force for news content.

The last time I wrote about feed readers, Google Reader was just about to overtake Bloglines. That was in May 2008 - things have changed. Google Reader's growth continued (with some setbacks) until November 2009. Since then, visits have been dropping off. As Kirkpatrick mentions in his article, RSS readers never really reached "change-the-world feed-reading mass adoption."

Last week, Google Reader accounted for .01% of upstream visits to News and Media websites, about the same level as a year ago. Google News accounted for 1.39% of visits and Facebook 3.52%. The following chart illustrates the increase over the past year in visits from Facebook to News and Media websites, relative to Google News.
Facebook and Google News to News Websites.png

Facebook was the #4 source of visits to News and Media sites last week, after Google, Yahoo! and msn (see table below). News and Media is the #11 downstream industry after Facebook, receiving 3.69% of the social networking site's traffic. To offer a comparison, 6% of downstream traffic from Facebook went to Shopping and Classifieds last week and 6% to Business and Finance and 15% went to Entertainment websites (YouTube in particular). (Note, my colleague Heather Dougherty posted an entry on Social Networks and Retail traffic earlier this week).

Facebook could be a major disruptor to the News and Media category. And with the Wall Street Journal already publishing content to Facebook, perhaps the social network can avoid the run-ins that Google has suffered recently with Rupert Murdoch. We will continue to watch this space.

News and Media clickstream.png

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:06 PM | (16) | (9)
In Categories News and Media | Social Networks

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Hi Heather, thanks for looking into this! Question: what % of online visits to news came from Google, Yahoo and MSN? Like, most of the remaining 95% after Facebook, Google News and Google Reader? I'm real curious and would like to know for my blog post about your blog post about my blog post. :)

Posted by Marshall Kirkpatrick | February 3, 2010 08:51 PM

Marshall, Sure thing - I've added a table above showing the top 10 sources of traffic to News and Media websites last week. We received the same question from a couple of other readers too. So a very good addition!

Best, Heather

Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 4, 2010 09:59 AM

Hi Heather,
Great chart and analysis. I'm curious why Twitter isn't tracked as a referrer to news sites. My experience is that they're about #2 or #3 for MediaShift traffic after Google. But perhaps it's difficult to track Twitter traffic from so many various apps and URL shorteners?

Posted by Mark Glaser | February 4, 2010 03:17 PM

Yes, I believe Facebook has a high loyal readership according to your figures.

Posted by J S Alarcon | February 4, 2010 10:32 PM

Interesting that Twitter doesn't show up in the top 10 list. Surely all of those Twitter.com and Twitter client links must be adding up to some significant traffic.

Posted by Ian Lamont | February 5, 2010 10:38 AM

Was Twitter mesaured?

Posted by Mike | February 5, 2010 03:50 PM

Interesting... can you generate a stacked line graph corresponding to your top 10 table? It would be interesting to see if it reveals which of the other upstream products are declining as FB's share grows.

Posted by James Kittock | February 5, 2010 04:51 PM

Thanks for all the comments.

Yes, Twitter was included. However, I should mention that we are tracking internet visits (not visits from mobile phones). Twitter.com accounted for 0.15% of upstream visits to News and Media sites last week.

I'll try to get a line graph for the top 10 table shortly...

Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 5, 2010 09:06 PM

Interesting. Do 'upstream visits' mean clickthroughs? Or might users have navigated from FB to news sites via bookmarks, typing URLs, or whatever? Is there a way of isolating clickthroughs? We'd need to do that to really know whether FB is driving traffic to news or whether it's just the large number of FB users that pushes it to #4. Incidentally the number of Twitter users is a tiny fraction of FB's, so it's not surprising it doesn't compare.

Posted by Jamie | February 9, 2010 06:27 AM

Hi Jamie, We are reporting any click - which as you can say can be from bookmarks, typing in a URL, etc. Through custom analysis we might be able to isolate clickthroughs. However, in what we currently have available, we report on the natural flow of traffic among websites - be that clicks on links or otherwise.

Cheers, Heather

Posted by Heather Hopkins | February 10, 2010 12:40 AM

Very interesting figures. From where comes the data? Google Analytics or your own statistics? I have learned that GA counts referrer very different from other statistic systems. If you go from FB to "site" and then back to FB again and after a while visit "site" via typing in the url GA still counts FB as a referrer.

Posted by Ola Henriksson | February 11, 2010 09:50 AM

Hi Heather, thanks for looking into this

Posted by Matrak | February 22, 2010 09:14 AM

Great analysis. How does this convert to actual traffic. In other words, how many people is Facebook sending to the Weather Channel every month? Are there spikes during the week or around events?
Thanks in advance.

Posted by Steve Mitgang | March 2, 2010 10:27 AM

Hello,
I am just discovering this article on a French blog,
I love Google reader,
Thanks

Posted by Ecommerce Wall | March 9, 2010 04:08 PM

Wow you're fixing data to go with what you want it to say. It's hardly fair to take Facebook as a whole and compare it to only one small portion of Google rather than take all of Google's domain. Google leaves Facebook in the dust. I thought journalists were supposed to be unbiased.

Posted by Mathieu | March 25, 2010 07:47 AM

good news for all social optimizers ;)

Posted by weblike | March 25, 2010 07:57 AM

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Heather Hopkins

Senior Online Analyst, Hitwise

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