How do people stumble upon content today? Excuse the Internet pun. A new report from Outbrain claims that while search still attributes for the majority of content discovery, that social media sharing is beginning to take up an even larger chunk of the pie. And this makes sense, right? In fact, even “search”-related finds are still a gray area to me. After all, someone created the content, and is now sharing it. It’s simply that the stumbles are happening organically, rather than through direct shares via social media outlets.
According to Outbrain’s research, the top three sources of traffic to content were Google, AOL and Yahoo. Facebook and Twitter showed up 4th and 8th on the list, respectively.
This puts search at 41% of content discovery. Content sites linking to other content sites at 31%. Portal homepages at 17%. And social media at 11%. Because the most-connected maven among your friends still probably only has a millionth of the views as AOL gets every day. That’s why social’s still behind, but catching up.