According to the latest data from Parse.ly, Facebook is driving more traffic to digital media website than Google. Parse.ly is a reputed analytics firm that collects data for about 400 digital publishers, including Fox News, The Atlantic, Mashable and more. As of July, Facebook claimed a 38.2% share of referral traffic, compared to 35.2% of Google.
Social referrals are the links that are shared on social networks and these have become a crucial source of new readers. These new numbers from traffic-analytics service has revealed that Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.
Until recently, Google has been the top traffic referrer but with latest figures by Parse.ly, the trend has changed. It is not simply about top market share between Facebook and Google but is a contest between social referrals and search engine referrals.
Parse.ly CTO Andrew Montalenti said, “I believe the reason Facebook did this is because they realized that a lot of the interesting conversations happening around the web were happening around major news, media and information, but the user-generated content was not enough to sustain the interest of Facebook’s users population.” “It’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory,” he added.
On the other hand, when we talk about search and overall web traffic referrals, Google is still the top referral source. The data is more representative of a trend in the media industry. Social sharing is undoubtedly become a much more important source of traffic, Montalenti said that change in Google’s referral practices may also played a role.
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