The Homepage continues to be the biggest traffic source for News Media

We had a Front Page study published on the Nieman Journalism blog a good year ago, which quite clearly depicted the Front Page as the biggest driver of Article Views. At the time, data showed that about half of all Article Views on any given day can be attributed back to the Homepage or a Section Front Page.

Last night we thought it was time to review those figures again. Looking at aggregate data for January 2013 for sites with a sum total of some 15 billion views a month we see the following distribution:

It's an interesting but not surprising confirmation of the continued importance of the Homepage and the associated Section Front Pages. The world is evolving for sure, but there's still a very large impact on views that's driven by the traditional front doors. We included Direct Traffic into the study this time and you’ll see people like Alexis Madrigal from The Atlantic speak of this as “Dark Social” – in other words, you could choose to club Social and Direct together as one Social segment, which would then confirm a solid growth in Article Views attributed to Social over the last good year and a half. 

It's just one more snapshot we took from anonymized distribution data across Visual Revenue customer base. I hope you find it useful. 

Cheers :-)
@DennisMortensen