Google used to drive 40 percent of The Guardian’s traffic, but social networks referred more than search several times in February, said Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development at Guardian News and Media.
In the U.S., Google refers a third of the traffic to news websites, four times more than Facebook, according to The State of the News Media 2012.
Nifty new app
Much of The Guardian’s Facebook traffic is attributed to an app that has been downloaded 8 million times since its launch in September, according to Journalism.co.uk.
“The ‘frictionless sharing’ app works by readers opting in to share all articles they read with their Facebook friends, generating more traffic for the news site with ‘no editorial curation’,” the site reported.
It is not clear how this app might be different from or better than those used by other news organizations. But if something similar were adopted at U.S. media, Facebook could become more of an ally of news organizations instead of just a competitor for readers’ time.
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