Facebook Surpassing Other Readers For Newsfeeds
04 February 2010
Calling Facebook the 'Promised Land' for maximum distribution, ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick reported in a February article that Facebook has called on its visitors to use its service as a newsfeed reader.
He said there are a number of reasons why Facebook could be the strongest online subscription option yet,
including that the social networking site’s newsfeed function is easier to read than RSS readers such as Google’s. He thinks Facebook is positioned to become the world’s leading news reader.
Hitwise reported that in the last week of January in the US, Facebook came in at a close fourth place to Google, Yahoo! and MSN for news and media site traffic. Additionally, while Google managed 1.39% of upstream visits to online news portals, Facebook cornered 3.52% of that traffic.
The character of social media sites makes them naturally conducive to newsfeed traffic, and they are taking advantage of this feature to compete with the big guys and capitalize on the market. Even The Wall Street Journal has recently begun publishing content to Facebook. People find it easier to access news in the Facebook format that they are already familiar with rather than subscribing to several other available newsfeeds.
