Here’s a sentence that Robert Thomson, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, has not said: “Facebook argues they drive traffic to sites, but the whole Facebook sensibility is inimical to traditional brand loyalty ... Facebook encourages promiscuity [in viewing different news sites] — and shamelessly so — and therefore a significant proportion of their users don’t necessarily associate that content with the creator.”
And here’s something media mogul Rupert Murdoch has never said: “We are going to stop people like Facebook or whoever from taking stories for nothing ... There is a law of copyright and they recognize it ... Some sites have tapped into a river of gold [by aggregating content] ... They take [news content] for nothing. They have got this very clever business model.”
But if you replace “Facebook” with “Google” or “Google News” in both quotes, they’re absolutely what they said (Thomson to the Australian and Murdoch at a press event in the US).
Here’s the strange thing, though: Facebook sends far more traffic to News International sites in the UK than Google News does, according to figures from Experian Hitwise, which monitors Web browsers’ (though not mobile users’) surfing habits. Google’s news aggregator service is the bete noire of the London Times owner and other traditional media outlets because it gives readers an instant hit without necessarily providing any traffic and hence advertising revenues.
In fact, figures from the data collection service show that for all news and media sites, Google News UK generates just 0.67 percent of traffic — while Facebook generates precisely 10 times as much at 6.7 percent. Having 450 million-odd users worldwide, with friends linked across continents, turns out to have its benefits. At least for Facebook.
So is this another demonstration of News International’s chiefs not “getting it”? Should their Web teams be showing them lists of referrers and exploring a new Facebook-bashing strategy? After all, the row over privacy settings has put the site at bay. Should Thomson do a quick find-and-replace on those Google-bashing speeches, and capitalize on the antipathy towards Facebook?
Perhaps not yet. One caveat offered by the research director at Experian Hitwise, Robin Goad, is that the above figures fail to reflect the importance of Google search in driving traffic to news sites rather than Google News.
“The thing is, are people coming to read news stories via Google News, or via search in Google? If people click on a news story in the main Google home page — which can happen, because news is now included in the ‘universal search’ results you get when you do a search — rather than from the Google News page, then we see that as a click from Google,” he says.
That does alter the picture: Google UK (the default for UK users) ranks much higher than Facebook on those measures: it is the “upstream,” or previous, site for 21.9 percent of clicks to news and media sites, compared to 6.72 percent for Facebook.
“I think that the majority does actually come from the Google home page,” Goad says.
That doesn’t mean, however, we should overlook Facebook.
“It is a big and growing source of traffic, though people don’t talk about it. They talk about other things — Twitter, for instance,” he says.
So could Facebook soon find itself referred to as a parasite, as Thomson spoke of Google?
“They don’t yet,” Goad says. “But maybe when they realize how much traffic it represents, they will.”
Where Google News has a sentence that tells you what the story is, Goad notes: “Facebook often has the first paragraph, so they’re stealing — if you want to use that word — more of the content.”
But Paul Bradshaw, a reader in online journalism at Birmingham City University, thinks the lack of vituperation about Facebook has different reasons.
“Firstly, this isn’t about content, or readers — this is about advertising. Google utterly dominates the online advertising market, and is therefore easily Murdoch’s biggest competitor, and therefore biggest target. Murdoch knows the message should be simple and endlessly repeated. If you start attacking Google, keep attacking Google — don’t muddy the message by changing tack,” he says.
“Secondly, Google is enormously wealthy — much wealthier than Facebook. The gamble here is that Google might just throw Murdoch a bone to shut up. Or that a government or two might decide to tax those enormous revenues and — even better — prop up the established news organizations with the proceeds,” he says.
“But finally, there probably is a fundamental lack of understanding by Murdoch. He sees his content appearing on Google and thinks it’s being stolen rather than referenced. The mooted move [of News International content] out of [the news archive database] LexisNexis suggests this is isn’t just about Google,” Bradshaw says.
In fact there’s an era ahead in which news organizations will have to get to grips with social media and its implications for their traffic and readership, he says.
“I think social media traffic is underestimated because it’s a relatively recent phenomenon — it’s taken years for people to realize how important Google was. SEO [search engine optimization] is still only now entering mainstream journalistic processes and systems and it will take another five years before social media optimization is also part of the furniture. Also, social media importance varies enormously from site to site, whereas Google’s impact is relatively consistent,” he says.
There’s another reason why the importance of social media traffic may be underestimated. Twitter is an interesting example of how social media is making it harder for news executives to know just where their traffic is coming from. For example, if you look at the data for pretty much any news Web site, incoming referrals from Twitter.com will likely figure in the top 10.
However, that number significantly underestimates the importance of Twitter to readership — because 75 percent of Twitter traffic doesn’t actually come via twitter.com; instead, it comes from people clicking in Twitter applications such as Tweetdeck, which use the site’s API (application programming interface) to access its database. If you click on a link in a Twitter feed on Tweetdeck, it won’t show up as a twitter.com referral.
Facebook, however, is the new elephant in the online newsroom. It’s the fast-growing social network and attracts far less attention than its far smaller rivals such as Twitter. And it is the users, not the site, who grab chunks of content to link to.
“The majority comes from people posting it around the site, rather like YouTube videos — so it’s driven by Facebook’s users, not Facebook itself,” Goad says.
By contrast, he points out: “Google only presents that data when you go through to search on something, so if you search for ‘David Cameron’ you’ll see results which include those news stories.” Facebook is thus more of an exercise in news serendipity, depending on your circle of friends, than Google’s directed attempt to organize the world’s information.
And if news executives are rubbing their hands, even as they mentally reclassify Facebook from being unimportant to being the next Google to being their new best friend because of its traffic-driving potential, there’s some dispiriting news: social media sites tend to display much shorter attention spans over any story than news organizations do. Those findings, from the Pew Research Centre’s report New Media, Old Media, show that consumers don’t stick long on any site, and social media doesn’t linger for any period on any story: A three-day lifespan is all that 53 percent of stories can expect.
Bradshaw thinks that we’ll simply have to adjust to it. The introduction in April of Facebook’s “Like” system, which any site can adopt with a couple of lines of code, so that signed-in users of Facebook will be able to recommend the page to their online friends, could have far-reaching consequences, he says.
“It has enormous potential. This isn’t just another Digg button. Firstly, there’s the enormous difference in user base. But more importantly, it demonstrates a level of engagement that can be sold to advertisers,” he says.
“I’ve said previously that the next big battleground for media organizations will be identity — and I can see the Like button being a site for that battle. Unlike the big spikes of ‘window shoppers’ that Digg generates, Facebook can attract a long tail of users with demonstrable value,” he says.
Advertisers have long recognized the value of word of mouth recommendations for building brand loyalty. However, Bradshaw concedes there is scope for development on the Like button.
“There’s a whole infrastructure to be built around it to make it measurable and meaningful to advertisers,” he says.
Facebook, then, is likely to become more important in news organizations’ plans. Unless, of course, something else comes along to overturn it. Best not to cling to that idea, though. No site has ever been as big as Facebook — not even MySpace. And who owns that?
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