Heather Hopkins is senior online analyst at Hitwise, which monitors traffic to web sites for Experian. She writes that "Facebook Users Prefer Broadcast Media."

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry about Facebook becoming the largest news reader. Facebook does send more traffic to News and Media sites than Google News but looking more closely at the data, I noticed that the two sites send traffic to a very different list of News and Media websites.

The following table starts to tell the story, showing the top 10 News and Media websites visited after Facebook and Google News last week.

She's puzzled why there is such a large difference in the two lists. And she tries to run additional analysis to figure out why the two lists aren't more similar.

I think the answer is that she is comparing apples to oranges. I might go to Google news to become more informed about a particular news topic. But on Facebook I'm more likely to share a different type of news, about bad weather coming my way, or more quirky content about the rich and famous (People magazine), etc.

Ms Hopkins is comparing news that is shared (Facebook), with news that is consumed (Google News). There's a big difference, as she has discovered.

- - -

Please see: The Latest Pew Report Reveals Very Sophisiticated News Consumers - SVW