Social media may be the new documentarian of breaking new events, but it lags behind the Drudge Report ^[1] in directing audiences to major news websites. According to a new study released by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism ^[2], only Google, the Drudge Report and Yahoo account for more than 10 percent of traffic to 25 of the Internet’s biggest news websites, including AOL News, CNN.com, and The Huffington Post. Unlike Yahoo and Google, which serve also as search engines, The Drudge Report generates significant traffic through its news links alone.

The below chart, generated by PBS NewsHour ^[3], illustrates the Drudge Report’s advantage over social media juggernauts Facebook and Twitter. While Facebook’s referrals are growing at the fastest rate of any social media, it still falls short of the Drudge Report’s traffic among 21 selected top news sites. The Pew report found Twitter’s influence negligible in comparison to both competitors.

Pew also profiled types of online news audiences and their behaviors. Most interestingly, they found that news websites’ audiences are mostly “casual users” visiting the site briefly only a few times a month; however, smaller group of loyal users visit a site more than 10 times a month. Read more from PBS NewsHour. ^{[3] [4]}