The FINANCIAL — How someone gets to a news organization’s website says a lot about the level of engagement and loyalty he or she displays toward the site and its content, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis conducted in collaboration with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
In this study of U.S. internet traffic to 26 of the most popular news websites, direct visitors—those who type in the news outlet’s specific address (URL) or have the address bookmarked—spend much more time on that news site, view many more pages of content and come back far more often than visitors who arrive from a search engine or a Facebook referral. The data also suggest that turning social media or search eyeballs into equally dedicated readers is no easy task.
These are among the key findings that detail how 1 million people enrolled in one of the nation’s most popular commercial internet panels have been connecting through their desktop and laptop computers with the most accessed or shared news sites of our time.
An analysis by Pew Research of three months of comScore data finds that among users coming to these news sites through a desktop or laptop computer, direct visitors spend, on average, 4 minutes and 36 seconds per visit. That is roughly three times as long as those who wind up on a news media website through a search engine (1 minute 42 seconds) or from Facebook (1 minute 41 seconds). Direct visitors also view roughly five times as many pages per month (24.8 on average) as those coming via Facebook referrals (4.2 pages) or through search engines (4.9 pages). And they visit a site three times as often (10.9) as Facebook and search visitors, according to Pew Research Center.
This higher level of engagement from direct visitors holds true across the full mix of sites studied, from those that rank among the most shared on Facebook, such as breitbart.com, to those whose traffic is heavily driven by traffic from search engines, such as abcnews.go.com (the website for ABC News); and from those with a small total audience (mrconservative.com) to aggregators (yahoonews.com). Even sites such as digital native buzzfeed.com and National Public Radio’s npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly.
The data also suggest that converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do. Most people that arrived at one of these popular news sites used only one of the three modes – suggesting that, at least on desktop/laptops, individuals tend to come to these news sites using a single method. Users had not, in other words, logged into abcnews.go.com in the morning to get the latest news and then later that night followed a link to another ABC story when checking status updates on Facebook. Of the sites examined, the percentage of direct visitors who also came to the site via Facebook was extremely small, ranging from 0.9% to 2.3%, with the exception of Buzzfeed at 11.3%. Similarly, direct visitors who also came to a site through a search engine ranged from 1.3% to 4.1% – again with one exception, this time being examiner.com at 8.6%.
Within these overall findings, some news sites display higher levels of overall visitor engagement than others. The average visitor to Foxnews.com (a site operated by the Fox News Channel), spent almost eight minutes per visit. By comparison, the average visitor to CNN spent 1 minute and 30 seconds on the site while visitors to nbcnews.com1 stayed about four minutes on average, according to Pew Research Center.
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