Comments on: Stat Rant: Does Facebook Trump Google For News & Can’t We Measure Twitter Correctly?

By: kevinpike

kevinpike — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 13:49:38 +0000

So many ways to get news today… I came here via email RSS.

Great post Danny. I hope this article gets as much news as the HitWise post.

By: WarrenWhitlock

WarrenWhitlock — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:34:52 +0000

I can’t remember how I got here.. there is so much evidence that show we don’t know that my head is spinning

One thing is certain, the trend chasing headline grabbing reporter out there don’t hold a candle to the thinking analysis we get from Danny.

By: andreaBG

andreaBG — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 13:51:11 +0000

I came here via Matt Cutts, Twitter.com, after navigating to Twitter from a tab that was open to FB, so, you can give Twitter the win for the hit. Yeah, Hitwise’s methodology is a bit um, wrong.

As a pretty hardcore FB user and also a news junkie, my read of the initial headlines was “wtf are they talking about?”. I use FB for just about everything *but* news. It sucks for news. Maybe my friend list of 800+ just sucks, and everybody else’s friend list includes tons of riveting news links, but mostly I have Farmville gifts and new baby pictures in my feed. ;)

By: nexcerpt

nexcerpt — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 12:13:32 +0000

Oh, the ~irony~ of reading this article at this moment! I had just arrived from this clickable image: http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/underload-7.png It explains so much of the statistical numbing down of society! Would Tufte swoon — or vomit? lolz

By: ann_donnelly

ann_donnelly — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 08:14:00 +0000

Great post, Danny! Unfortunately people are going to remember the headlines that made it all over the net and offline news because of those stats. I was nearly one of the guilty ones that just hit RT when I saw it, but then common sense did tell me that there was something not quite right about it. Thanks for digging further.

By: Aaron Bradley

Aaron Bradley — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 23:19:55 +0000

Thanks for highlighting the fact that Hitwise was comparing Google News with Facebook and Twitter, and not Google itself. This is a tremendously important difference which has already led many to misinterpret these results. Among news-savvy SEOs it is well-known that the Google News vertical within the Google web results is the primary driver of mass traffic, and not Google News itself (not to mention news sites within web search).

It would have been very interesting indeed to see Facebook and Twitter traffic to news sites compared to Google. One wonders whether or not this would have made for such a juicy blog post headline.