Readers much less engaged when referred by Facebook: Pew Research

Readers of some of the top US news sites are more engaged when they go directly to the website rather than through Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center released on Monday.

The research found that users who come directly to a news site spend about three times as long per visit, or almost five minutes on average. Those who find the news by searching or through Facebook spend about two minutes.

Direct visitors also view about five times as many pages per month as those coming through Facebook referrals or through search engines such as Google.

The study is revealing because increasingly news organisations are relying on social media platforms to distribute content especially to reach younger readers.

And yet the research shows that those readers who come to an article or video through Facebook are younger and more fickle in their loyalties.

The Pew study, conducted in collaboration with the John S and James L Knight Foundation, analysed Internet traffic from online measurement firm comScore to 26 of the most popular news sites during April, May and June of 2013. They included sites owned by Yahoo, AOL's Huffington Post, Twenty-First Century Fox's Fox News, the New York Times, BuzzFeed and the BBC.

The report looked at three ways people come to news articles: directly, through Facebook and through searching.

The study analysed the online reading behaviour of 1 million people who use desktop or laptop computers. Data from a smaller group of readers on smartphones and mobile devices suggested a similar pattern, the authors said.

"Converting social media or search eyeballs to dedicated readers is difficult to do," the authors of the report wrote.

"Even sites such as digital native BuzzFeed 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."

Some of the sites that exhibited high levels of engagement included Foxnews.com, where the average visitor spent almost eight minutes per visit. By comparison, the average visitor to CNN spent about a minute and a half.

The range of sites getting referral traffic from Facebook varied. The New York Times for instance gets 37 per cent of its traffic from direct visitors and only 7 per cent from Facebook.

BuzzFeed receives 32 per cent of its referrals directly while 50 per cent are from Facebook.

"Facebook and search are critical for bringing added eyeballs to individual stories, and they do so in droves," the authors wrote.

"But the connection a news organisation has with any individual coming to their website via search or Facebook is quite limited."