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 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.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 06:06 PM | (12) | (7)
In Categories News and Media | Social Networks

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