News aggregators aren’t growing like they used to, but publishers still see their value

By Sara Guaglione

Three years ago, publisher analytics firm Chartbeat saw news aggregators becoming the fastest growing traffic referral source. But with the share of traffic from aggregators dipping, that’s not so much the case anymore.

“Everything is down,” said Jill Nicholson, Chartbeat’s CMO. “By and large, people are just not reading as much as they were during 2020.”

Traffic driven by news aggregators — as a percent of total traffic referred by social, search and links — has gone down from from 18-20% in 2020 to about 14% in 2022, according to Chartbeat data, which analyzed aggregators including Apple News, Google News, SmartNews, Yahoo News, News360, Newsbreak, Flipboard, Upday, MSN, Feedly, NewsNow, Newzit, Drudge Report, Press Explorer, Inoreader, Ground News and Pocket.

But compared to 2021, news aggregators’ share of referral traffic has been relatively flat, Nicholson said. “The shrinkage as a proportion probably just has more to do with the outsized growth of search than anything else,” she said. As a percent of traffic, search grew by three percentage points between January 2021 and September 2022.

While not as big of a traffic driver as search and not growing as it has in the past, news aggregators as a referral source are arguably quite steady — and still valuable — for some publishers. This is the case at Trusted Media Brands: “Over the years, it really has been pretty steady in terms of how much traffic they drive in any given month,” said Vince Errico, president of digital at TMB.

The aggregators driving the most traffic are Apple News, which generally accounts for 35-40% of the traffic share, according to Chartbeat, followed by Google News at roughly 12-14% and SmartNews at 2-3.5%. Other aggregators account for less than 1%. (The data is based on Chartbeat customers who allow the measurement firm to aggregate and anonymize their data for research purposes, a Chartbeat spokesperson said). From November 2021 to September 2022, SmartNews’ share of traffic increased from about 2.4% to around 3.2%, the spokesperson added.

“Aggregators are a great way to diversify your traffic sources,” Nicholson said. While traffic referral sources are dominated by search, “if you’re getting a non-trivial amount of traffic from the aggregators, it can help you — and because it is a little bit more steady, at least as a whole, it can just be a great way to supplement that traffic in case you do have some struggles on one of the platforms or there are changes that are out of your control,” she added.

Despite the stagnation, publishers are noticing some interesting trends in the traffic that aggregators are driving to their sites:

An executive at a large digital women’s publisher who asked to remain anonymous said some of the smaller aggregators have had traffic “taper off significantly.” The aggregators that encourage readers to stay within their apps rather than link out have had traffic drop by about 30% year over year. But Apple News — which does encourage readers to remain in its app — has “consistently …read more
Source:: Digiday

Author: Aaron