It’s no secret that the Armenian press gets a significant portion of its readers from Facebook. The most loyal readers from Facebook visitors are those who’ve “liked” a given news outlet’s Facebook page. 

Let me present figures from the Facebook pages of Armenian online news media. Of course, what’s usually compared are pages according to readers and the number of “likes”. But often because the page is not properly managed, visitors stop being visitors as such and no longer make use of the news feed. 

For this reason, I’ve included another figure here — to what extent the audience interacts with the page, and comments on, shares, and “likes” articles. This is the “talking about this” indicator. This figure shows the number of people “talking about this” in the last week.

People “talking about this” are the engaged audience. And so, let’s organize the pages according to this indicator. What’s also interesting is the relationship between these two figures: those who “liked” the page and those who are talking about it. We can formulate this relationship as talking about this / likes x 100%. 

Based on this equation, the relationship between the two indicators for CNN is about 4%; RIA Novosti, 3.5%; and the BBC, 2.5%. In Armenia, there are many cases where this figure reaches 10% or even 20–25%.

Tert.am – 77,054 likes · 7,539 talking about this

Civilnet.am 23,212 likes · 6,288 talking about this

1in.am – 81,212 likes · 4,632 talking about this

Slaq.am – 46,291 likes · 4,443 talking about this

News.am – 76,767 likes · 3,145 talking about this

Aysor.am – 14,004 likes · 3,134 talking about this

Lragir.am – 20,739 likes · 2,967 talking about this

168.am – 21,638 likes · 2,386 talking about this

Panarmenian.net – 23,456 likes · 2,354 talking about this

Lurer.com – 32,028 likes · 2,324 talking about this

Aravot.am – 14,241 likes · 2,243 talking about this

Galatv.am –  6,367 likes · 2,031 talking about this

Medialab.am – 3,357 likes · 1,920 talking about this

Haynews.am – 28,955 likes · 1,837 talking about this

Azatutyun.am – 30,582 likes · 1,605 talking about this

Shamshyan.com 12,688 likes · 1,021 talking about this

Hetq.am – 5,036 likes · 1,015 talking about this

Asekose.am – 13,377 likes · 992 talking about this 

Times.am – 20,986 likes · 917 talking about this

Newsarmenia.ru – 12,166 likes · 760 talking about this

7or.am – 21,861 likes · 685 talking about this

Yerkir.am – 6,941 likes · 673 talking about this

A1plus.am – 5,544 likes · 537 talking about this

Mediamax.am – 7,564 likes · 489 talking about this

Pastinfo.am – 5,632 likes · 338 talking about this

Panorama.am – 7,183 likes · 272 talking about this

Armenpress.am – 13,560 likes · 205 talking about this

Hraparak.am – 5,839 likes · 188 talking about this

Epress.am – 809 likes · 48 talking about this

Henaran.am – 5,652 likes · 19 talking about this

I looked at the most visited news sites according to Armenian web resources rating site Circle.am and a few other sites which aren’t on Circle.am. The data was accessed at 10 pm on Mar. 13. The links on the pages are from the news outlets’ websites.

In the list above, I didn’t include

• pages that had less than 1,000 readers
• sites of major TV companies, since they also include unique programs and soap operas
• news aggregators — the main content of which is republished material from other sites

Samvel Martirosyan

The views expressed in the column are those of the author's and do not necessarily reflect the views of Media.am.