Google Dwarfs Bing & Yahoo As Traffic Source For Major News Sites

Google is said to have about 65-70 percent market share of searches in the U.S., but for many publishers, Google’s share of incoming search traffic is much higher.

That’s certainly the case with major news sites like Reuters, Mashable, Dallas Morning News, The Next Web and others that use Parse.ly’s content optimization platform. Parse.ly just issued its first Authority Report, a study that looks at the aggregated traffic to its hundreds of clients. The study covers July 2013 and measures more than five billion page views generated by 160 million unique visitors.

It’s no surprise that Google is the top overall traffic source for these news sites, especially since Parse.ly is lumping all Google properties together — Google.com search traffic, Google News, YouTube, Google+ and more. Google’s 200+ million page views is significantly higher than second-place Facebook’s 73 million page-views-driven in July.

A breakdown of just search engines shows an even bigger disparity. Google absolutely dwarfs the page views that Yahoo (a little more than 40 million page views) and Bing about 13 million page views) send.

Again, some of this is due to the inclusion of all Google properties in Google’s totals — it’s not a pure search-vs.-search comparison. Tumblr, for example, isn’t included in Yahoo’s total. Then again, Tumblr sent these major news websites a tiny fraction of traffic in July, so including it wouldn’t really have changed the chart above much at all.

For more on the social sites that Parse.ly tracked in July, see my article on Marketing Land: Facebook Driving More Than 2x Twitter Traffic To Parse.ly’s News Clients.