Facebook drives over 80 percent of the traffic of mobile readers to news sites, making it the King of News for smart phones and showing how its censorship of conservative media can have a huge and negative impact on them, according to a new survey.
Pew Research Center said that Facebook towers over Twitter in delivering mobile readers to news sites.
“Facebook sends by far the most mobile readers to news sites of any social media site,” said Pew.
“Facebook sends the vast majority of social media traffic to these news stories: 82 percent of the social traffic to longer stories and 84 percent of the social traffic to shorter news articles. Twitter, on the other hand, accounts for just 16 percent of referrals to longer articles from social sites and 14 percent for shorter,” said the latest Pew research.
News sites more and more rely on Facebook to deliver readers and the Pew study shows just how important the nation’s leading social website is to the potential survival of media sites.
Gizmodo reported that Facebook censors conservative media sites and “routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section.”
That has the potential of costing conservative sites key traffic.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]
