Social media
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch recently opined that all web enabled devices - even the Apple iPad - are useless without content. While his self-interest in making a statement like that is transparent, it's no less true. People don't just connect to the web for the hell of it, they want instant access to content, be that social YouTube clips, news, or the millions of other things you can experience online.
All this is self-evident, but the battle that's currently underway concerns who makes money from all this online content viewing, and how. Murdoch has been prominent in its criticism of Google - the primary driver of traffic to news sites - because it offers people the ability to circumvent the pay-walls he has created for sites like wsj.com, in an attempt to derive additional revenue from online traffic.
So he will be probably be heartened to see a recent blog post from online traffic watcher Hitwise, which revealed that, last week, Facebook drove more traffic to news and media sites than Google News. Here's a chart showing the relative proportion of traffic to news and media sites driven by Google News and Facebook respectively over the past year.
To put this into further context, Google Reader only accounted for .01 percent of visits to news and media sites, while news and media was still only the 11th most popular destination after visiting Facebook accounting for 3.69 percent of the traffic from the site last week. Six percent went to shopping and classifieds, the same proportion went to business and finance, while 15 percent went to entertainment, with YouTube a big proportion of that.
Google itself (as opposed to News or Reader) is still by far the biggest driver of traffic to news and media, as it presumably is to everything else, but it looks like Facbook is on the rise. If we get to the stage that it's as influential as Google, that could fundamentally change the search giant's negotiating position with the media.
