Report Finds Social Networks Not All That Infuential

From all the twitter about Twitter and Facebook plus, of course, Google+, you'd think that social networks had seized control of the national consciousness.

Not so, says a new report from Outbrain, an Internet research organization.  It finds the somewhat retro Drudge Report one of the largest sources of traffic to content sites.

Drudge, which employs only two people in addition to founder Matt Drudge, drove 6.85% of the traffic to Outbrain's publisher network, which includes such big names as The New York Times Media Group, MSNBC and The Atlantic.

The Outbrain report indicates that social networks still drive relatively little traffic (7%) compared to content sites (56%) and search (37%). Readers who go from one content site to another are more likely to be engaged with what they’re reading, “presumably because they are already in content-consumption mode,” the study noted.

Among social networks, Twitter came up on top (1.69% of all traffic referrals), followed by Reddit (1.10%) and then Facebook (1.07%).