Social networking sites gradually are having a greater impact on information streams in Armenia.
Experience shows that for the average Armenian who doesn’t use television and radio as his main source of information but gets his news primarily from the internet, the main platform for information is not news outlets but social networking sites.
Many of the local news websites lose (or don’t acquire) loyal readers: people visit websites mainly from Facebook.
The number of active Facebook users in Armenia today reaches 850,000. And these users are the main consumers of the product of many news outlets — as Facebook users.
Similarweb is one of the main platforms today providing website traffic analytics on the global level. Though the numbers cannot be very accurate, they do present statistical approaches.
Many sites provide Similarweb their internal Google Analytics data, including several local Armenian news outlets, which allows us to get a rough idea on the the main sources of visitors to a site.
The local news website in Armenia with the highest traffic, News.am, gives us approximately the same picture as all the other local news outlets — the main source is Facebook.
But in the case of the news media in other countries, we can see that the distribution among social networking sites is not always as extremely one-sided as it is in Armenia.
The figures for several Armenian news websites below, according to the number of their visitors from Facebook, can be seen below. It is apparent that the majority of news websites get half (and sometimes more) of their visits from social networking sites, the vast majority being from Facebook.
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Not included above are news outlets that have editorial teams with whom I’m not familiar and sites where the “About Us” section is empty or contains only deep philosophical thoughts — without editorial details. Also not included are those websites that haven’t provided Similarweb their Google Analytics data.
Samvel Martirosyan
The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.
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