Facebook takes over from Google as traffic driver to news sites and publishers

People who work for major news websites or publishers know the importance of ''social referrals'' - or links that are shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

These generate significant incoming traffic and are a source of new readers of news websites. Now, traffic-analytics service Parse.ly, says Facebook not only just vies with Google, but has overtaken it by an appreciable amount.

Parse.ly's chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti said in an interview with Fortune that according to the company's latest estimates, social-media sources (of which Facebook was by far the largest) accounted for about 43 per cent of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for only 38 per cent.

Parse.ly's network includes over 400 major news and media outlets, including traditional publishers such as Wired, The Atlantic, Reuters and The Daily Telegraph, as also a large group of digital-only outlets such as Mashable, The Next Web and Business Insider.

Collectively, these accounted for over 6 billion page views and more than 1 billion unique visitors per month.

This is not the first time that Facebook has nipped Google in the traffic-referral race, according to Montalenti.

Facebook beat Google by a slender margin last October, but this month's lead was far more dramatic - and according to the Parse.ly CTO, from the company's data it was clear that search had hit a kind of plateau and was not really growing any more as a referral source for media.

The rise of the social network had been slow and steady since at least 2012, as it had been gradually wining referral traffic marketshare from Google Sites, including properties like Google News and Google.com web search.

It said social media optimisers are now hot property, overtaking SEO experts.

According to commentators, a shift of the kind lent credence to the theory that the world's biggest publishers saw a dramatic drop in web traffic in April due to a Facebook algorithm tweak rolled out around the same time.

This shift comes even as Facebook made its plan to get more of that content on its own site public.

The social network launched its much discussed publishing product - Instant Articles - earlier this summer to allow media companies post their articles directly to its iOS app.

This would make it even easier to access news articles online, as Instant Articles, offer news organisations the chance to create interactive content that was much simpler and faster to read (See: Facebook to launch Instant Articles to make it easier to access news online).

Although multiple reports had pointed to an upcoming onslaught of more Instant Articles from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic, those floodgates had not yet opened.