Facebook And Pinterest Dominate Traffic Referrals On The Web; Google+ Is 'Dwarfed' By Rivals

Facebook and Pinterest are the new kings of referred traffic, according to Shareaholic, a company that monitors where traffic comes from on the web.

The company looks at traffic arriving on 200,000 sites, and measures who sends it there. Over the last year, Shareaholic, says, Facebook, Pinterest and to a lesser extent Twitter have come to dominate where traffic comes from on the web:

These three social media power players collectively accounted for 15.22% of overall traffic last month. Given their community and share-friendly nature, it's no surprise that they top the list in traffic referrals and have grown more than 54% each in share of overall visits. Facebook grew 58.81%, Pinterest by 66.52% and Twitter 54.12%. Pinterest's growth is especially interesting now that the company is flirting with paid advertising.

Unfortunately, Google+ still isn't having much of a comparative impact, Shareaholic says.

Google+ isn't yet competitive. Although Google+ referred a fair number of visits to online publishers last month (0.04% is a substantial number when we're looking at a data set of hundreds of millions of visits), it is hardly a leading referral source. Google+ is consistently dwarfed by the competing social media sites.

Here's the data: