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March 19th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda Article recommendations from your friends on Facebook and Twitter aren’t a major source of traffic for news websites, according to Pew‘s State of the Media 2012 report — but they have potential to become one.
The annual release focuses on trends in the world of journalism but as news continues to be made, read and reported with technology, this year’s edition is chock full of interesting data about the ways we all use the Internet.
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According to Pew, social media use is on the rise, more people are reading the news online and advertisers are spending more money on Internet advertising than ever before. All of those factors have the potential to make social media one of the most important elements of a news outlet’s business plan.
Social Media Use
Facebook usage is up, according to Pew: 133 million users in the U.S. from 117 million last year. The social network’s got 845 million active users globally — about 54% of the world’s online population.
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It’s also winning the social media popularity contest in terms of time spent on the site. Facebook users scrolled through their news feed, gawked at photos of friends and played games like Farmville for an average of 423 minutes in December of last year.
Tumblr came in second (151 minutes) and Pinterest third (80 minutes). To some surprise, MySpace (13 minutes) beat out Google+ (5 minutes).
Twitter is growing as well — 24 million active users in the U.S., according to eMarketer. That’s an estimated 32% increase from last year year. The company is tight-lipped on exactly how many people use the service.
Journalists have flocked to Twitter, says Pew, giving it “outsized influence” in the media game. Its ability to disseminate breaking news before traditional wire services gives it a “critical role” in journalism, says Pew — Whitney Houston’s death announcement on Twitter 55 minutes before it was confirmed on the AP wire is just one example.
“Twitter is the new newswire,” said Chloe Sladden, the director of content and programming for Twitter, at a recent conference on the future of media at Stanford University.
(It’s worth noting that news broken over Twitter is not always accurate, as was the case with Joe Paterno’s death.)
News Consumption
Social media, says Pew, is not yet an overwhelming driver of news traffic. Only 9% of the average news organization’s traffic comes from social media and 9% of online consumers of news in the U.S. “very often” get their news via Facebook or Twitter.
However, those numbers are up from 2010 — and Pew expects them to continue rising. Those numbers also differ wildly for various outlets — outlets with more developed social media strategies tend to see more traffic from Facebook, Twitter and other sites.
Meanwhile, most Facebook users who use the site for news click on articles posted by their friends are family, while more Twitter users get their news from news outlets or journalists.
What are digitally-savvy people reading online? Often the same news sources they’ve read for years, according to Pew. Despite the creation of new online media outlets, the “traditional players” remain the go-to news source for most online consumers of news. “Long-standing” news organizations accounted for 17 of the top 25 most highly trafficked news websites, while 8 are online-only outlets.
However, more Americans are turning to the Internet in general as their primary source of news — 40%, as opposed to 20% who rely on newspapers. Television news, however, remains as popular as the Internet and newspapers combined.
Pew suggests that the creation of frictionless news sharing apps on Facebook might be contributing to the rise of Internet news — Yahoo boasts 25 million users of its social reader, and The Guardian‘s has been installed five million times.
The drawbacks of those apps, according to Pew, is the way they keep eyeballs away from a company’s website (and its advertising) and that it makes media outlets more dependent on Facebook.
Online Advertising
How’s the online advertising market doing? Very well. $32 billion was spent on Internet ads in 2011, up 23% from the previous year. Digital ads now make up 20% of all advertising in the U.S.
By far and away, that money is heading directly for the coffers of Google and Facebook. Together, they earned 68% of that $32 billion pie in 2011.
According to Pew, Google and Facebook excel at the ad game because they’re able to collect detailed data about their users and use it to show users advertisements highly relevant to their life and interests. Do you often search for film trailers and swap movie reviews with Facebook friends? Guess what: you’ll probably see cinema advertisements on Google and Facebook.
Pew believes that future growth of the online ad industry will come from local advertising (based on IP addresses and other data), video advertising and mobile ads — the latter of which is expanding faster than any other kind of digital ad. If news companies find a way to tap into the advertising money well, it could help them thrive in the digital age.
What’s Your Take?
Do you see any trends in Pew’s findings that you’re excited about? Do you think social media will become more of a traffic driver for news organizations? Sound off in the comments below — we’d love to hear from you.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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