The online universe belongs to Facebook and Google - the rest of us are just living in it
When it comes to online publishing, the world belongs to Facebook and Google. The rest of us are just living in it.
At least that's the conclusion you could draw from a recent report from Parse.ly, a provider of audience insights for publishers. Facebook and Google each drive about 40% of traffic to Parse.ly's partners and customers. Yahoo is in a distant third with less than 5%.
Not every publisher sees this precise pattern, but most will agree that Facebook and Google are way ahead of everybody else when it comes to driving readers to their sites.
So what about Twitter, where journalists hang out all day? Parse.ly notes that Twitter may not provide much direct traffic to news sites, but that it still serves as an important role as the first online place where big news breaks, and has high rates of engagement around big news as people have real-time conversations about it. So it's still wise to be active on Twitter because the people who drive conversations will then take information they saw there and share it with their friends and contacts...on Facebook.
