{"id":278370,"date":"2010-02-04T10:40:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T15:40:03","guid":{"rendered":"tag:business.theatlantic.com,2010:\/\/3.35324"},"modified":"2010-02-04T11:17:02","modified_gmt":"2010-02-04T16:17:02","slug":"is-facebook-not-google-the-real-global-newspaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/278370","title":{"rendered":"Is Facebook, Not Google, the Real Global Newspaper?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook’s page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the<\/i> major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America’s leading information hub. To me the issue boils down to a question: should we get our news from our friends, or from the news?<\/p>\n

Surely, the answer for most of us is: both. I visit the New York Times’ homepage and Google News and blogs, and I also follow the URLs in friends’ tweets and email alerts to articles. But I never would have expected that Facebook would actually supplant Google as the premier driver of stories on the Web. It turns out that’s exactly what is happening<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Hitwise analyst Heather Hopkins reports<\/a>
\nthat in the last week of January, Google Reader accounted for only .01%
\nof visits to news and media Web sites and Google News pushed only 1.39%
\nof the category’s traffic. Meanwhile, in just the last six months, the
\nshare of traffic going to media sites from Facebook has doubled to
\n3.52%. Overall, including search result traffic, Facebook has become
\nthe fourth largest source of traffic for media, behind Google, Yahoo
\nand MSN.*\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Does this mean that Facebook is supplanting Google?<\/a>
\nWell, no. Google owns the online ad market, commanding a quarter of all
\ntraffic and $22 billion in online ad revenue. Facebook’s ad strategy is
\nburgeoning, but its 2009 revenue totals were around $400 million —
\nwhich is a little more than a dollar for every Facebook user.<\/p>\n

But the emergence of Facebook as a real driver of news stories tells us something important about how news works<\/i>.
\nGetting our news from our friends is nothing new. It’s as old as the
\nconcept of neighborhood gossip. But if Hitwise analytics are capturing
\na true trend in media, and the share of Facebook outbound links really
\ndoubled in the last six months, it paints the picture of an
\nincreasingly nichefied world of news readers. Friends are reading what
\ntheir friends are reading, who are reading what their<\/i> friends
\nare reading, and so on. It presages the deterioration of top-down news,
\nand the rise of news-reading groups whose news sources and opinions
\nbecome a centripetal, self-perpetuated cycle of information — or
\ndisinformation. <\/p>\n

In his 2008 book True
\nEnough<\/a><\/i>,
\nFarhad Manjoo explains that the fragmentation of the Internet
\nallows different groups to create, and live in, their own “split”
\nrealities.
\nThis is especially true in politics, where increasingly facts can’t find
\nus anymore–instead, we find our own political “facts” in the corners
\nof
\nthe Internet, like our friends’ Facebook feeds, that reflect our
\nbeliefs. Facebook is a unique and wonderful artery to our friends’
\nlives and interests. But if we define our reading by our friends’
\nlibraries, we will all find what
\nwe already expected rather than what we need to know. <\/p>\n

___________________
\n*As the Atlantic Wire’s John Hudson explained<\/a>, even these numbers
\nunderestimate Facebook’s dominance. With 193 billion page views in
\nDecember 2009, Facebook was almost as trafficked as Yahoo and MSN combined<\/i>.


\n

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\n\"\"<\/a>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Facebook’s page view explosion in the last months of 2009 — plus new evidence that it is becoming the major driver of news — has some analysts wondering whether the site is taking over Google News and personalized Google Reader accounts as America’s leading information hub. To me the issue boils down to a question: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-278370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}