Facebook is driving an increasing amount of traffic to news sites but Google remains the top referring service, according to a study published on Monday. The study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism looked at the behaviour of news consumers online during the first nine months of 2010 using audience statistics from the Nielsen Co. The study examined the 25 most popular news websites in the United States, looking at how users get to the sites, how long they stay there, how deep they explore a site and where they go when they leave. An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver. The Nielsen figures did not break down where the remaining 60 percent of a news site’s traffic comes from but the study said much of it stems from direct visits to the home page of a news site. “Far from obsolete, home pages are usually the most popular page for most of the top news sites,” the study said, and were the most viewed part of the site for 21 of the 25 studied. Google Search was responsible for driving an average of 30 percent of traffic to top news sites with the Drudge Report and Yahoo! also ranking as major traffic drivers. But social media — and Facebook in particular — is “rapidly becoming a…
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