Facebook Links Skew to Cable Networks

By John Eggerton -- Multichannel News, 3/8/2010 8:10:00 AM

Washington — If online tracker Hitwise is on the mark, cable news operations should be rooting for Facebook as the news referrer site of choice.

Three weeks ago, Hitwise said that Facebook had overtaken Google News in sending traffic to news and media sites.

It turns out it is more than just raw volume that cable programmers should be looking to.

According to a new blog posting last week, Facebook also sends a far greater percentage of its traffic to cable news sites than Google News, which tends to send more traffic to print outlets.

CNN received 5.92% of its traffic from Facebook two weeks ago, compared to 1.77% from Google News. Fox News had similar results: 5.50% of its traffic came from Facebook and only 1.18% from Google News.

Fox parent News Corp. benefitted from both sites, depending on the print or cable outlet. The Wall Street Journal got a whopping 10.37% of its U.S. visits from Google News, but only 1.41% from Facebook.

Hitwise senior online analyst Heather Hopkins cited an article in Th e New York Times about the “water-cooler effect” of social networking sites boosting on-air media as one possible explanation.

Hitwise’s results are based on 10 million Internet users.