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Drudge Generates More News Traffic Than Social Media
tcd004 writes "A report released today by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that the Drudge Report is a far more important driver of online news traffic than Facebook or Twitter. In fact, for the top 25 news websites, Twitter barely registers as a source of traffic. The report hits on several other interesting findings about news behavior."
It might just be my connection, but for being such an important site, DrudgeReport.com is one uuuuugly site.
Sent from my CR-48
Don't most links on Twitter go via redirects like bit.ly? In that case I'm not sure how you would tell if traffic is coming from Twitter.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I bet PBS gets more traffic from /. today than from Drudge Report.
Or perhaps not, since nobody will read TFA (which is only a graph).
How often does Drudge force a reload to drive up counts?
Is the amount of data moved by the site counted or is it the transactions/sessions. The data moved by twitter would be small, but the transaction count would be high.
Not only are social media and "web 2.0" overrated, but apparently css is too. Actually the grand champion of traffic drivers is probably good ole' email.
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Just so we're clear here, a news aggregator site creates more traffic to news sites than a social media site.
Breaking news: People reading a news site are more likely to read other news sites than people playing farmville, news at 11.
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
Everyone I know who is on Facebook is annoyed when I post news stories/links. They all seem to envision FB as being thoughtless fun. Sports posts are fine, what I had for breakfast is fine, people dying in Syria or Exxon buying the fracking rights under their land are verbotten. Seriously. FB is the new vast wasteland, so is it any wonder there are fewer news clicks coming from there?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
So you know it's concise and up to date :D
Nowadays I've got breakingnews.com in its own window. Yeah, it's owned by MSNBC (not that there's anything wrong with it) but you get updates on freshly posted stories from popular news sites as well as twitter posts from journalists. I'm sure they have human editors to filter through everything, but they seem to be actually doing their job since stories and tweets are linked within minutes of going online.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
People flock to social media sites to see information about friends, family and other people they are interested in. If they want news, they go to the news site or a news aggregate site like Google, Yahoo, or Drudge.
"Thbbft!" - Bill the Cat
Hate his politics if you want, but Drudge often breaks news before other venues do and it's a quick and easy place for a bunch of headlines at once without a bunch of javascript and streaming video nonsense.
Whatever you might think of Drudge's political leanings, there are a few things to consider:
* If it's on Drudge the larger news outlets will soon be talking about it. His page has become what the NYT front page used to be. The 6-year old kid and the TSA agent story became a mainstream story because it was on Drudge. This morning there's TSA inspecting an infant. Expect that one to be picked up by the news outlets soon.
* Drudge has influence over the political environment. One of the best ways to get a glimpse of the upcoming presidential race is to follow Drudge, even if it's with a "know you enemy" POV.
* Most of Drudge is simply links to other news outlets. Occasionally he has his own exclusives. 90% or more of the news links take you AWAY from Drudge to sites with an array of political leanings, both right and left.
If anything, I've always seen Facebook and Twitter as a distraction from reality (in the US). Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.
I read Drudge b/c I want to know what Republicans are saying, and then I go to Salon (and oddly enough, Jon Stewart) for the other side. Drudge has a powerful voice; he puts his spin on the news through his "clever" (ie. biased) phrasing of news events, which is usually picked up by the local and regional news stations. So the news might be (real-time example) "Too Much Fear? Package Threat Forces Evacuation Of Dallas DART Station" but Drudge titles it "USA FREAK OUT: TERROR FEARS; FALSE ALARMS". Interested to see what Fox has to say about it this evening...
/.
If I'm looking for "real" news, I usually go to NPR or
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
because it is simple, elegant, utilitarian, and spare, like the google front page. it gets the job done without unnecessary showing off
whenever substance trumps style, i am an ally, even though i hate drudge's politics
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Parent makes an important point. Drudge doesn't host any news. It's sole purpose is highlighting content elsewhere on the Internet. The Huffington Post generates far more traffic than Drudge (source (this is debatable, I know)), but the site doesn't drive traffic elsewhere. It will link to another site only for as long as it takes them to copy that site's content and get their own page up to keep you on the HuffPo.
I'm curious about how they measured this also. Twitter and Facebook drive traffic to lots of places not news-related. I follow hundreds of scientists of Twitter and we don't link to the news stories about research, we link directly to the research papers themselves. There's a wide variety of "news content" that involves going directly to the primary source instead of having it mistranlated by some non-specialist. Pew has a very silly and antiquated definition of news.
So I take this study as interesting trivia, and like most trivia it's not terribly informative about the importance or influence of any of these media.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
The purpose of social media is find out what your friends or contacts are doing, not far-away news.
Perhaps the reasons too few people care about US foreign policy, Wikileaks information, and voting is because they're busy playing Farmville or catching up on the lasted Royal Wedding details.
I suspect it's more that they've tried voting for people who promise Change! and discovered that it makes no difference.
Most people I know with a Facebook or especially Twitter, do updates from an app on their phone. In Twitter's case there are also dozens of desktop apps available. I believe there are some for Facebook as well.
Traffic measured by hits to a URL isn't giving the whole picture.
No sig for you!!
Schizophrenia is a hell of a disease.
Of course Twitter refers almost no traffic to news sites - Twitter sends traffic to bit.ly and the like, which then redirect to news sites. To a lesser extent, so does Facebook.
Looking through the original study, they don't even attempt to address this issue. Remarkably shoddy work.
so maybe folks on facebook just don't rtfa.
How odd it is to see the phrases "Excellence in Journalism" and "Drudge Report" in the same sentence.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
It's been my experience that even the people who post news and political rants, seldom actually want to actually discuss the things they're saying. I had a guy post a rant about a political candidate. When I commented on it, politely expressing an opposing view and asking where he got his information, he first called me names, then accused me of drug-use, then complained about people always thinking they're experts and wanting to tell him how to vote. Finally told me to keep my political opinions to myself. This was all after he posted a political opinion in a public forum...
Needless to say, I removed the jerk from my "friends" list. I guess I learned not to put people on my friends list just because they lived in the same dorm as me in college.
Twitter's real problem is many of their users are receiving tweets on devices that are not conducive to reading the news, and on devices being held by people who are far less likely to be able / want to read the news anyway.
Think about it - if someone's preferred method of communication is 160 characters or less, how likely are they to want to read an article?
paintball
I wouldn't call FB a wasteland, I would call it an async cocktail party. Not many people want to be bummed out by the guy with all the global warming crisis news at the cocktail party. It's just not the right venue -- people go to FB for a very specific, personal purpose, which in many cases (I think) bears a lot of similarity to the kind of communication that occurs at cocktail parties (bumping into people who you haven't seen in awhile, 1 and 2 degree of separation conversations, and lots of random tidbits from a whole bunch of people).
Note: If you don't like the word cocktail party, call it "kegger" or "house party" or whatever your demographic uses for same social function.
That sort of Javascript code usually says: "Well we were too lazy / too cheap to hire proper Ajax developers."
You've got the wrong group of FB friends... At least for that content.
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They are not comparing page views. They are comparing referrals. That only occurs when someone clicks on a link and is redirected to one of those 21 web pages. How often his page refreshes doesn't matter at all.
I say propaganda.
If you define "generates news traffic" as "driving news traffic to top Web sites," which the study does, then yes, Drudge is important. But who says those "top news sites" are themselves important? The implication here is that somehow more people use Drudge than Facebook for news, and I think that's debatable! Anyhow, the premise here is weird and reflects some old-school thinking.
Currently hooked on AMP
You need new Facebook friends. My wife is connected with a bunch of journalists and she gets breaking news through it before the MSM picks it up. For example, when President Obama announced he was going to speak to the nation a week ago Sunday, she heard about it first on Facebook. Then we turned on the television. But news like this doesn't need a link so the news sites might not have gotten a hit from this.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
It's all about who your friends are. Do the interests of your Facebook friends reflect on you? I don't want to go there.
If I used a sig over again, would anyone notice?
Table layout... vlines... too many links... an animated GIF (of a bubble-gum machine style police light)... 1997 design at it's best! The best part is that Drudge has kicked most major news outlets in the ass for over 10 years...
-- $G
I'm always amused by the comment sections on stories that get linked by Drudge. It's like a freakin' firehose that sprays misspelled conspiracy theories about illegal space alien Obama clones that maraud across the countryside in the thick of night, eating babies and freedom while dropping turds of poisonous socialism that are festering with job eating worms.
Drudge report also generates more news than this article!
Do you see what I did there?
A small protest in eastern rural Botswana against local bread prices led to a minor scuffle in which two protesters received minor injuries. Coming up next a half-hour interview with a mother of three from At-Bashi, Kyrgyzstan about her life as a clay pottery store owner.
LOL so true XD
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Hah I'd welcome such a story on Slashdot these days. Now it's like "dumbed-down toy for computer-illiterate grandmas now available in new color!"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Find the kids with huge number of followers. And start calling them "Sir" or "Madam", they are your next Senator or Rep or a Prez.
Scared ya, right? OBL was nothing folks. This is scary.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
And other than political orientation - that's different from Slashdot how? (Yeah, I grant most Slashdotters can actually spell.)
That is a bother. It's about as bad as the HuffPo site comments that blame Bush for personally executing 15,000 Iraqis a day and physically planting the the explosive that brought down the Twin Towers, while Sarah Palin was rounding up operatives to shoot down moderate Democrats with the aid of campaign posters.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
(Yeah, I grant most Slashdotters can actually spell.)
You must be new here.
Wait...
Well I heard that if you hang around UofH long enough AND give them enough money they'll just give you a degree. :)
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.
Anyone remember the slashdot effect, where we would shutdown servers due to all the traffic we would send.
I guess nerds do not rate the news.
Wouldn't be all that surprised. If it works for star athletes, its gotta work for heavy donors.
When I was an undergrad, there was a guy working on a physics degree who was also playing football (not a starter by any means). Apparently one of the physics advisors took him aside and told him he really needed to get serious about physics and give up football. Soon after, one of the coaches took him aside and told him he really needed to get serious about football and give up physics.
Drudge succeeds at the newsfeed game for the same reason Google did as a search engine: Just The Facts, Ma'am(tm). Go to CNN, Fox, Huffpo, whatever and you are bombarded by flashy-blinky-OMGTHEYMAKETHATCOLOR? bits of stuff that may or may not be related to news. And drudge is text, making it easy to view on mobile devices.
I really don't care if my news site has New and Improved(tm) columns and colors every 6 months. I'm only here for the data, bro.
Guy in the cube next to me got zapped when he went to Drudge to verify Internet connectivity. Sure, probably a rouge ad server but we haven't been back since. Drudge denied anyone reported it to him (we did) and also claimed it was a political lie to discredit his site (it wasn't).
Since I have seen this story referenced on drudge and nobody I know has tweeted it... Makes sense I guess....
FragHARD or don't frag at all
No, you should never vote for, never mind register as a member of a political party you don't believe in. If you have a choice between what you consider two evils, you do not choose the lesser evil, you go outside the system. There is seldom an A or B only choice in life.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I'm the only one that has never heard of this Drudge thing before?
Like me, you're probably not American. I always thought it was some sort of shitty celebrity gossip site like Perez Hilton's, mainly because it first became famous over the Monica Lewinsky affair.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
So, that implies you vote straight ticket of whatever party you've chosen, if you indeed chose one. Else, you'd have to say you believe in various parties, and it doesn't sound like that's what you're saying.
That party really loves you. It also means that they can take your vote for granted unless you go directly to the "outside the system" option.
Rarely are you going to find a party who you agree with on all issues.
We aren't uninterested in news - we just don't use Facebook to find it. You also don't typically find porn through Facebook but no-one's doubting porn's popularity among the young.
I wondered why all those attractive young women on facebook refused to friend me.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I had a guy post a rant about a political candidate. When I commented on it, politely expressing an opposing view and asking where he got his information, he first called me names, then accused me of drug-use, then complained about people always thinking they're experts and wanting to tell him how to vote. Finally told me to keep my political opinions to myself. This was all after he posted a political opinion in a public forum
Shitcock!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Sometimes the most common isn't the best. A lot of times, actually.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Yep, hard to say which one would be better? Short career with your abilities giving out in your early 30s and not much to show for a life's work or you could choose football. I did spend a bit of time at good old U of H. Thought it was a good school. Please take these comments in the spirit that they are meant. Just poking fun here. I am not a physicist but I used to work for a bunch of em.
This aint Daytona and you aint Dale Earnhardt. So stop trying to draft on Interstate 40.