August 10, 2011
Updated on Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Outbrain recently released our Content Discovery and Engagement Report for Q2 2011. The report was intended to identify patterns in how people are accessing and engaging with online content based on data pulled from reader sessions across our platform of more than 150 top-tier publishers.
This is a space that we are deeply passionate about and providing accurate, unbiased results is our number one priority. After re-examining the data, we identified some results that have changed. We’ve included a full list of these changes below.
Top 20 Traffic Sources to Content Pages
| 1 | |
| 2 | Yahoo |
| 3 | AOL/Huffington Post |
| 4 | |
| 5 | MSN* |
| 6 | Drudge Report |
| 7 | CNN |
| 8 | Outbrain |
| 9 | StumbleUpon |
| 10 | |
| 11 | FoxNews.com |
| 12 | |
| 13 | MediaTakeOut |
| 14 | Fark |
| 15 | Slate |
| 16 | Comcast |
| 17 | NewsNow.co.uk |
| 18 | Wikipedia |
| 19 | Digg |
| 20 | Real Clear Politics |
| *Includes Bing Live.com |
Key changes
AOL moved up from #5 to #3
Facebook moved from #11 to #4
StumbleUpon entered the list at #9
Breakdown of External Traffic Sources to Content
Original Findings
Content – 56%
Search – 37%
Social – 7%
Revised Findings
Content – 46%
Search – 40%
Social – 14%
Breakdown of Referral Traffic by Search Engine
Original Findings
Google – 68%
Yahoo! – 16%
Bing – 14%
AOL – 1%
Other – 1%
Revised Findings
Google – 80%
Yahoo! – 10%
Bing – 9%
AOL – 1%
Twitter vs. Facebook: Referral Traffic to Content by Vertical
| Vertical | ||
| News | 88% | 12% |
| Home & Lifestyle | 87% | 13% |
| Entertainment | 83% | 17% |
| Sports | 81% | 19% |
| Recreation | 87% | 13% |
| Health | 88% | 12% |
| Technology | 76% | 24% |
| Business & Finance | 85% | 15% |
| Electronics | 82% | 18% |
| Autos | 91% | 9% |
Key change
Facebook referred more traffic to content pages than Twitter across all verticals.
