Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Social networking site Facebook is influencing what news gets read online as people use it to share and recommend content, new research shows.
The study on the flow of traffic to the web's 25 largest news destinations was released today by the Pew Research Centre's Project for Excellence in Journalism.
Facebook was responsible for 3% 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% to 8% 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 power. Google's dominant search engine supplies about 30% 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, far more than any other internet service built for socialising and sharing.
"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.
Meanwhile, major news sites are getting less than one percent of their traffic from Twitter, even though it had about 175 million accounts last year.
Among those studied by Pew, only the Los Angeles Times' website got more traffic from Twitter than Facebook. Twitter accounted for 3.5% of the online traffic to the Los Angeles Times, compared with slightly more than 2 percent from Facebook.
The Drudge Report, a site started during the 1990s, 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 during the first nine months of last year.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments