One of the long-lingering questions in online news is whether Google is more a help or a hindrance to news producers? Does Google drive more traffic to a news site or pull more potential traffic away by offering users the headline and first paragraph on their Google News site and selling advertising against that content? According to the links users follow, Google News sends most users on to a news destination, but the range of those destinations is rather limited.
Most of visitors to Google News (not the larger search aggregator Google.com) do click to a news story. According to the data, less than a third of news.google.com visitors headed to Google.com or another Google service. The remainder followed a link to a news site.
But the benefactors are limited. Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%). Six additional sites were each the destination for 7-10% of visitors during the time period studied.
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For many news creators, by contrast, there is a back and forth relationship with the social networking site. Again, these numbers are much smaller than the back and forth with Google. And users leaving sites for Facebook does not necessarily indicate that every visitor is leaving to share news. But it is likely that as least some of their audience is heading to Facebook to share the news content they have just seen.
FOOTNOTE:
1. As noted earlier, at least 5 panelists need to exhibit a behavior over the course of a month for that behavior to register in their dataset.
