Social networks drive less traffic to news sites than you might think

Let’s hope he has some well-informed friends, or else he’s going to think today’s top story is that the Double Dream Hands guy released a new video. (He hasn’t.)

It turns out my friend isn’t alone.

A study from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism on the flow of traffic to the Web’s 25 largest news destinations revealed that Facebook was responsible for 3 percent of traffic to 21 of those sites. Some sites got as much as 8 percent of their traffic from Facebook.

That’s still quite low compared with traffic generated by Google, which accounts for 30 percent of traffic to those sites.