Facebook's role in news dissemination
Jinfo Blog

By Nancy Davis Kho

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A new study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism quantifies a trend that has been building for some time and complicating the efforts of news organisations to leverage online revenues: Facebook as a top source for curated news. The study, which examined 25 news websites in the US market, found that while Google.com remains the most popular entry point,  Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic at five of the top sites.

Not surprisingly, one of the findings of the study, which utilises audience statistics from the Nielson Company, is that there are distinct classes of news users consuming news with different patterns, from casual visitors who frequent a site like USAToday.com only once or twice a month to "power users" who visit a site up to 10 times in a month and spend a total of an hour there. The implication is that news organisations have to figure out ways to identify different types of users and apply differentiated pricing, perhaps along the lines of the NYTimes paywall introduced in March and written up by Penny Crossland, wherein users can view up to 20 articles/month before a subscription fee kicks in.

The importance of Facebook as a tool for news dissemination quantified in this study, however, points out a weakness in the NYTimes.com model that Penny mentioned in her post; that is, "those accessing NY Times articles via social media or blogs, i.e Facebook and Twitter, will be able to read that content even if they have reached their 20 article limit". (Interestingly the Pew study noted that Twitter barely rated as a source for online news referral, suggesting that Facebook is the social site where news organisations should concentrate their efforts.)

The more Facebook climbs in the rankings as a starting point for news research, the more it will behove newspapers to tackle the complex, layered models required by the number and variety of online news starting points.

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