Social media drove more Internet traffic than search engines in 2015 for top news stories

Publishing analytics provider Parse.ly found that more traffic on 2015's top news stories came from social media than from search engines.

A study by the Pew Research Center from June 2015 found that Facebook "is far and away the most common source for news about government and politics" among Millennials. About six-in-ten Millennials reported Facebook as a source of political news, 17 percentage points higher than the second most consumed source of CNN at 44 percent.

These recent studies shed light on a broader development of the increasing importance of social media for news organizations. For media outlets, it is no longer sufficient to simply be online. For media outlets to be successful with future generations, they will need specific online strategies and a prioritization of social over search.

One case study that demonstrates this trend is the dress debate of last spring. A BuzzFeed article asked whether a picture of a dress was white-and-gold or black-and-blue, and the world responded. Within the first five days, the post had over 38 million views and became an international debate, according to media analyst Ben Thompson.

The article was not featured on BuzzFeed’s homepage and blew up on Twitter first, followed by Facebook. “Few if any arrived via BuzzFeed’s homepage,”Thompson analyzed. Without social media, the dress argument would likely never have happened.

The dress phenomenon was primarily driven by young people, according to Thompson's analysis. Millennials and Baby Boomers differed on what medium they primarily rely on for news, according to a study by the Pew Research Center. The two generations demonstrated nearly inverse relationships between Facebook and local TV news, with Millennials depending mainly on Facebook for political news while Baby Boomers favor local TV news.

The dress is just one example of a social-first focus that an entire company was built upon in BuzzFeed. In 2014, the New York Times reported that about 75 percent of BuzzFeed's traffic came from social media accounts. As discussed later in this post, BuzzFeed has become one of the most influential, controversial and successful journalism outlets of the 21st century.

“When Edward R. Murrow moved from radio to television, people said it was undignified,”BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said. “When CNN first aired, people made fun of it because it was so grassroots and low budget.”

This next major technological change of the web has created a new group of publications that have been able to take advantage. More recently, in the past few years, a change within this change has occurred, as social media is now the most important driver for traffic. Companies that have taken advantage of both changes, such as BuzzFeed, find themselves as the leaders of the journalism business.

Increasing dependence on social media has dramatically transformed journalism business models

BuzzFeed is far from the only media outlet adapting to these changes. Every digital media company has had to adapt to the changing habits of younger Web-native generations.

Media blogger John Herrman broke down the different trends media organizations felt from 2013 to the present and even to the future.

"2013 was the year every major site with a social strategy broke traffic records by a mile; 2014 was the year they looked around at everyone else's sudden success and became slightly less confident touting their numbers, because they all hit them by doing and talking about very similar things,” Herrman wrote. “2015, when a single weird or clever native Facebook video can easily out-traffic a week of a site's web content, is the year it's becoming clear to everyone who these audiences really belong to, and what it means to borrow them. 2016 is the year we find out what the price of access will be."

The main driver for change in the media industry is the transfer of power from publisher, the content creator, to platform, the content distributor, according to Herrman.

An article posted on Facebook not
as a link (left) and as an
Instant Article (right)

Facebook has transitioned from a content referrer and aggregator to a host with Facebook Instant Articles, which are published directly on Facebook instead of linking to external sites. Snapchat launched Discover, where news organizations including BuzzFeed, Vox and National Geographic among others post Snapchat-curated content.

Now, publishers have to follow the content policies for each of the social sites they rely on for traffic. Any controversial content, such as an article that may feature explicit or hateful language or pictures, will be regulated by the social media giant's standards -- not news editorial departments.

"Maybe platforms will decide that the news, or at least its messier fringes, isn't worth the trouble, and will focus instead on entertainment,” Herrman wrote.

The fear is that these increasingly powerful platforms have "no special interest in publishing beyond value extraction through advertising,” Herrman wrote.

Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of the digital publication Vox, wrote in a July 2015 Vox article about how he saw media organizations trending to the point where news will eventually cater content to a wide variety of platforms for views, with most not being their own.

"Within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard and at least one or two major players yet to be named,” Klein wrote. “The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously."

Sean Mussenden, a University of Maryland journalism professor and director for the Digital Bureau of Capital News Service, also shared his concerns over how news is digitally distributed. Mussenden emphasized a need for news organizations to maintain control of their own audiences no matter what the medium is.

Increased power for platforms raises new concerns for media outlets over who owns their audiences

Klein’s great fear over this change is a dumbing down of media content, which helped motivate him to run Vox, a news organization dedicated to explaining and critiquing the news.

"The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today,” Klein wrote, “pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don't control and didn't design."

The upside for media companies is larger audiences than ever, although the economic significance of the audience’s size is questioned when everyone else is growing at an equally fast rate, as Herrman pointed out. The main downside is to innovation and uniqueness. The content that will do the best will be simple and multi-platform, a 21st-century version of wire copy.

These concerns over audience and branding are embedded in a deeper belief in a capitalist, profit-driven economic model for the journalism business. Media scholar and activist Robert McChesney started Free Press, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for structural changes to the media business.

McChesney’s activism is mainly rooted in the belief that government support for the media, particularly local coverage and investigative reporting, can support failures in journalism and wean the media off of commercial support. McChesney argued that corporate support can make media outlets more tentative to bite the hand that feeds them by going after major corporations.

Additionally, the online environment has made it harder for start-up news organizations that are both sustainable and professional, according to McChesney. The rise of blogs and citizen journalists are often praised as the democratization of the news, but blogs and citizen journalists have essentially been an amateur, unpaid replacement for professional, paid news coverage. McChesney calls for government subsidization of locally-owned, nonprofit and start-up outfits as the answer.

Mussenden has seen both sides, as a previous Washington correspondent for the Orlando Sentinel and now as director for a student-driven non-profit news outlet, Capital News Service.

The rise of the Internet caused media to throw out old business models; the rise of social media is now doing the same

BuzzFeed is often mocked as not serious journalism or as clickbait. However, BuzzFeed has invested its resources into producing impactful journalism, including funding for international correspondents and deep-dive investigations. While many news organizations, such as the Boston Globe and Wall Street Journal, have had to shutter international bureaus, BuzzFeed has thrived with a social-first business model.

In August, NBCUniversal invested $200 million in BuzzFeed, valuing the digital native at about $1.5 billion. By comparison, the New York Times has been roughly evaluated at about $1 billion this past year.

A June 2015 USA TODAY story reported that the 400-member editorial team for BuzzFeed included 170 news staffers, an investigative unit of 19 staffers, a narrative journalism unit and overseas bureaus. In June 2015, BuzzFeed launched an app solely for news, called BuzzFeed News.

In that article, BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti said, "News might not be as big a business as entertainment, but news is the best way to have a big impact on the world."

As the media analyst Ben Thompson, wrote, "The world needs great journalism, but great journalism needs a great business model. That's exactly what BuzzFeed seems to have, and it's for that reason the company is the most important news organization in the world."

Mussenden agreed with the idea that BuzzFeed has had significant influence on the rest of the industry and believes that influence is warranted and well-earned.

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan has described the Times’ own changing business model, which has followed similar trends as BuzzFeed. The Times has seen revenue from native advertising rise and print advertising plummet, Sullivan wrote.

Native advertising is an online ad that mimics the editorial style of the site they are placed on. BuzzFeed heavily uses native advertising, called “native content” by BuzzFeed, and the financial results have caused many other organizations – that may have previously scoffed at BuzzFeed's methods – to copy their ways.

New York Times chief executive officer Mark Thompson named doubling digital revenue within the next five years as a top goal for the Times, and native advertising seems poised to play a significant role in this increase, according to Sullivan.

Yet, Sullivan still expressed her own doubt about native advertising, writing, “If native ads look too much like journalism, they damage credibility; if they look nothing like journalism, they lose their appeal to advertisers. A fine line, indeed.”

Digital advertising revenue is becoming an increasing piece of the pie for media conglomerates. In 2015, online revenue grew by 18 percent to $50.7 billion market-wide. In the same year, newspaper print revenue continued to fall, this year by four percent, to $19.9 billion market-wide.