Facebook取代谷歌成为美国新闻网站最大的流量来源

    在大型新闻网站或出版社工作的人都知道，社交媒体导流，也就是在Facebook和推特等社交网络上分享给别人的链接，已经成为网络流量的关键来源；同时，一段时间以来，转发和搜索一直在争夺新读者首要来源的宝座。现在，流量分析机构Parse.ly公布的新数据显示，Facebook已经不再只是和谷歌缠斗了，它把谷歌远远地甩在了身后。

    Parse.ly首席技术官安德鲁·蒙塔伦蒂接受《财富》杂志采访时表示，该公司的最新估算结果表明，社交媒体（业界一哥Facebook的规模远远超过其他同行）约占Parse.ly覆盖的媒体网站流量的43%，谷歌的份额则为38%。

    Parse.ly的客户包括400多家大型新闻和媒体机构，其中既有《连线》杂志、《大西洋月刊》、路透社和《每日电讯报》等传统新闻机构，也有一大批纯数字媒体，如Mashable、The Next Web和Business Insider。总的来说，它们的每月页面浏览量约为60亿次，独立访问者超过10亿人。

    蒙塔伦蒂说，这并不是Facebook首次在导流方面击败谷歌。去年10月份Facebook就曾小胜一场，本月的领先优势则大得多。同时，通过Parse.ly的数据可以清楚地看到，搜索网站似乎进入了瓶颈期，作为媒体导流的来源，它们实际上并未实现增长。此外，Facebook的影响力“表明它一直呈上升态势”。

    Facebook的增长势头一直都相当强劲。Parse.ly的数据表明，就在去年1月，在Parse.ly覆盖的媒体网站的流量贡献中，Facebook还只占Parse.ly所记录来源的20%；现在，它的份额已经翻了一番多。但蒙塔伦蒂指出，这并不意味着Facebook贡献了所有流量的43%，而是说在Parse.ly可以获得数据的流量来源中，Facebook占43%。

    另一流量分析机构Chartbeat首席执行官托尼·黑尔表示，该公司数据反映出了类似的局面。尽管通过谷歌搜索来导流的网站在种类上远远超过Facebook，但大型新闻和媒体网站对Facebook的依赖程度明显高于谷歌。他说：“在我们覆盖的所有网站中，其中三分之一，Facebook比谷歌的导流效果好；但在排名前五分之一的网站中，Facebook贡献流量较多的约占一半。”

    毫无疑问，社交分享已经凭借自身的天然优势成为远比其他渠道重要的流量来源。不过，Parse.ly CTO蒙塔伦蒂认为，谷歌在导流方面的调整可能也是影响因素之一。此前谷歌会告诉新闻媒体机构，哪些关键字给它们的报道带来了最多的流量；但现在，谷歌在大多数情况下已经不再提供此类数据。谷歌的说法是这样做出于安全考虑。在蒙塔伦蒂看来，此举也可能是因为谷歌不希望这些机构在自己的算法上做文章。

    不论原因如何，无法获知谷歌带来了哪些流量，同时也不知道它为什么这样做也许让人们对搜索引擎优化越发不感兴趣，并让他们更专注于使用Facebook和推特等社交平台。蒙塔伦蒂指出，Facebook今年早些时候披露了Instant Articles项目，通过这样一些做法，它一直在向媒体献殷勤，让后者把更多的内容放在自己的网站上。。

    蒙塔伦蒂认为，上述变化的唯一问题在于，当人们想知道为什么这篇文章很受欢迎而那篇文章反响平淡时，Facebook就会变得几乎像谷歌那样高深莫测。这种情况下，媒体就很难制定出连贯的社交媒体策略。

    他说：“媒体方面在推特等社交渠道上下了很大力气，但我们的数据表明，推特基本上是个边缘型流量来源。这很可惜。在算法怎样发挥作用等问题上，Facebook的透明度要低得多。推特在内容方面提供的有用信息比Facebook多很多，而Facebook更像一个暗箱，无法得知其运作方式。不过，它是个巨大的流量来源，而且还在不断增长。”（财富中文网）

    译者：Charlie

    校对：詹妮

    Anyone who works for a major news website or publisher knows that social referrals—that is, links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter—have become a crucial source of incoming traffic, and have been vying with search as a source of new readers for some time. Now, according to new numbers from the traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, Facebook is no longer just vying with Google but has overtaken it by a significant amount.

    Parse.ly’s chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti said in an interview with Fortune that the company’s latest estimates show that social-media sources (of which Facebook FB 1.32% is by far the largest) accounted for about 43% of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for just 38%.

    The company’s clients include more than 400 major news and media outlets, including traditional publishers such as Wired, The Atlantic, Reuters and The Daily Telegraph, as well as a large group of digital-only outlets such as Mashable, The Next Web and Business Insider. Collectively, the network accounts for about 6 billion pageviews and more than one billion unique visitors per month.

    This isn’t the first time that Facebook has edged past Google in the traffic-referral race, Montalenti said. The social network took the top spot by a small amount last October, but this month’s lead is far more dramatic — and the Parse.ly CTO said that from the company’s data, it’s clear that search has hit a kind of plateau and isn’t really growing any more as a referral source for media. Meanwhile, Facebook’s influence has “shown it’s on a continued growth trajectory.”

    That trajectory has been fairly dramatic: According to Parse.ly, as recently as January of last year, Facebook accounted for just 20% of all the traffic from documented sources to the company’s network of media sites, and now it is more than double that. Montalenti said this doesn’t mean Facebook accounts for 43% of all traffic, but just the sources that Parse.ly is able to get data on.

    Tony Haile, CEO of the traffic-analytics firm Chartbeat, said that his company’s data shows a similar theme: although Google has a much broader range of sites it sends traffic to via search, the larger news and media sites have become much more reliant on Facebook. “When we look at all the sites over our network, a third have more Facebook traffic than Google,” he said. “But when we only look at the largest 20%, about half of them have more traffic from Facebook than Google.”

    Although there’s no question that social sharing has become a much more important source of traffic in its own right, the Parse.ly CTO said that a change in Google’s referral practices may also have played a role. While the search company used to show publishers what keywords were used to direct the most traffic to their articles, in most cases it doesn’t provide that kind of data any more. The company says this is for security reasons, but Montalenti says it could also be because Google doesn’t want publishers to game its algorithm.

    Whatever the reasoning, that lack of insight into what kind of traffic is coming from Google and why could have helped contribute to a lack of interest in SEO and growing interest in using social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter TWTR -2.62% . Facebook has also been trying to court media companies and get them to host more of their content on the site, Montalenti noted, through efforts such as the Instant Articles project it announced earlier this year.

    The only problem with that shift, the Parse.ly CTO says, is that Facebook is almost as impenetrable as Google when it comes to trying to figure out why one article did well and another didn’t. And that makes it difficult for publishers to build a coherent social-media strategy.

    “There’s a lot of effort among media companies being placed on specific social channels like Twitter, but our data shows that Twitter is basically a distant traffic source,” says Montalenti. “That’s unfortunate because Facebook is a lot less transparent around things like how the algorithm functions. There’s a lot more useful data from Twitter about their content, but FB is more like a black box in terms of how it operates. And yet it’s this huge and growing traffic source.”