- News consumption on Facebook has been increased due to the coronavirus outbreak.
- The coronavirus is a big story and it revives Facebook as a news powerhouse.
- Other news sites are also getting more traffic.
People are stuck in their homes after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic which has resulted in more usage of Facebook features like texting and calling. People are also curious to get updates about the virus and this results in the increased traffic for virus-related news publishers on social media. In the US, more than 50% of total news consumption on the social media platform is related to the coronavirus. Kevin Roose and Gabriel J.X. Dance published an article that shows the effect of the virus on news consumption from Facebook. They wrote the article based on a report which was posted by Ranjan Subramanian, a data scientist at Facebook. He posted the report to the internal network of the company. The article provides detailed information about the news consumption users of the social media platform, and stats about the company to redirect the users to news sites, or the rating this platform applies to influencers and news publishers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be a really big story and Facebook is not the only platform to get increased traffic. But we can surely say that the virus has revived the social network as a news hub. On Thursday, More than 50% of the articles being read on the social media platform in the United States were related to COVID-19. The internal report indicates that the company is trying its best to redirect the power news consumers to the authentic information source. More than 90% of the views on coronavirus information comes from these power news consumers.
We can check the stats through Parse.ly’s Referrer Dashboard. According to the Parsely data, Facebook remained consistent in redirecting the traffic to news sites.
But this does not support the idea that Facebook has gained a fundamental role in distributing news. No doubt, the news consumers on Facebook have increased significantly but there are a lot of other news sites that have total traffic much more than that. Famous news publishing sites such as, The NY Times, The LA Times, Business Insider, and The Atlantic, all had experienced a rise in the number of people visiting their website, up to doubled or nearly doubled in the past few weeks.
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