Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Social Media Market Share
In the old days, three years ago, Digg ruled social media. Five years ago it was Slashdot. If you could get your story on the front page then it was good for tens of thousands of visitors a day. It looks like times have changed and the new social media power houses aren’t exactly obvious. You’re going to assume that it’s Facebook and Twitter, but you may be surprised by what percentage of traffic is derived from each site.
According to StatCounter, the free counter site that many of us have on our sites, Facebook was the obvious winner with almost half of all traffic from social media(48%) derived from links on their site. The data comes from 13 billion pageviews across all the sites in the StatCounter network so it gives a pretty solid representation of what’s happening on the net. The second biggest driver of traffic…….Twitter? Nope. StumbleUpon. Surprisingly, StumbleUpon sent 25% of all social media traffic. Twitter was a very distant 8.3%.
This data certainly doesn’t weigh the quality of the traffic but merely the numbers. If you were to ask any site owner which type of traffic they would like to have and I think they would certainly rank it Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, Digg, and then Stumbleupon. The data also is a bit misleading in the fact that Facebook traffic is spread out between many many more sites due to the amazing amount of users. Sites like digg and reddit spread the daily traffic among 100 or less sites, giving those sites a concentrated hit of traffic.
Here are the top 7
1. Facebook (48.9%)
2. StumbleUpon (24.91%)
3. Twitter (8.53%)
4. Youtube (6.14%)
5. Reddit (4.14%)
6.MySpace (1.73%)
7. Digg (1.65)
Various Other Sites weighed in with small percentages to make up the balance. LinkedIn came in 12th with .34%
I have an old StumbleUpon account that I started using again recently. It crippled my site with traffic. I am not sure if it’s because the account is so old and therefore given more “authority” but I had to stop stumbling my site.
You are welcome to start crippling this article 🙂
Hmmm. Let me give it a try. I need to see if its just my server anyway.
Nope. I’m not seeing the same effect on yours. Time to call my server management company!
Hey it sent 300 uniques to the article so far. I would say that is pretty good traffic. Of course I stumbled it as well and I have heavy pull. 🙂 Thank you
You got about as much as I do (about 445 now) but mine came in under 30 minutes and caused apache to have problems.
My server is an older one anyway as I’ve been with the company for awhile. It might be time to upgrade to something better and/or optimize apache.
Oh and thanks for allowing me to test!
My servers can easily take 10,000 an hour. In the old days, 2 years ago, I had a site that a few times a year received over 100K uniques a day or more. Heavy traffic is not the issue, getting traffic for a domaining blog? That’s a little more difficult task. Not a very large user base.
You are with MediaTemple.com, right? I have heard good things about them. I might need to check them out. Thanks, Shane!