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Abstract
In response to the popularity of social networking sites, newspapers are distributing content through Facebook and Twitter. Yet the role of social media in these newspapers' overall business model remains unclear at best. Are they repeating the same “mistake” seen in their Web experiment by seeking eyeballs before locating a revenue stream, giving content away for free, and granting audience access to aggregators? Analyzing the top 66 US newspapers' social media presence, this study empirically examines the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms. As of 2012, the distribution of newspaper content through social networking sites has become a common practice. Twitter is more effective than Facebook in terms of audience reach. While the results indicate a positive relationship among newspapers' Facebook, Twitter, Web, and print readerships, social media subscribers continue to represent a small fraction of print and Web users. Despite the hype about the potential of social media sites as news delivery channels, the magnitude of their contribution to Web traffic and advertising revenue seems underwhelming.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This study is partly funded by the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. We thank Glenn Frankel, George Sylvie, Avery Holton, Jordan Humphreys, Elizabeth Blancas, and Angela M. Lee for their support and assistance.
Notes
1. A text message from a cell phone is limited to 160 characters. Twitter was designed for users to update their status via their cell phones. Reserving 20 characters for user names, Twitter (Citation2009) adopted the limit of 160 characters from Short Message Service (SMS).
2. The average weekday circulation of the US daily newspapers is only 34,541 (Editor & Publisher Citation2008).
3. The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Post were not included in the sample because their audience data were not available in the Audience-FAX database. With weekday circulation of 2,096,169 for The Wall Street Journal and 1,784,242 for USA Today (for the six months ending in September 30, 2011), even if their data were accessible through the Audience-FAX database, these two newspapers would still be excluded as statistical outliers.
4. “Newsfulness” refers to the extent a multi-purpose device or platform is used for news purposes (Chyi and Chadha Citation2011).