Facebook has turned itself into "the dominant force" in the U.S. media today, and its current role is growing fast,
The Atlantic reports.
In its 2015
State of the Media report issued Wednesday, Pew Research Center said that continuing a trend from recent years, Facebook is one five companies that generate 61 percent of digital ad revenue. (The others are Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Microsoft.)
During the course of two years, Facebook more than doubled digital ad revenue, and the company made $5 billion in advertising money last year
— comprising 10 percent of all digital ad revenue.
Facebook is also garnering 25 percent of all display ad revenue and 37 percent of display ads on mobile devices, according to The Atlantic, and it shows absolutely no sign of slowing down.
The Pew report illustrates the dramatic effect that Facebook (and other social media sites) have had on the way Americans receive their news.
For most news consumers, "long gone are the days of sitting down to read an entire newspaper. Instead, people are increasingly beginning with Facebook and dipping into a variety of news sites on an article-to-article basis," The Atlantic noted in summarizing the report's findings.
For example, on average, visits to The New York Times’ website and associated apps in January lasted only 4.6 minutes. With the Times (and to an even greater extent with other news sites) "most online newspaper visitors are 'flybys,' arriving perhaps through a link on a social networking site or sent in an email," The Atlantic added.
Increasingly, Americans have come to regard this experience as browsing a story online rather than reading the newspaper.
In an earnings call last year,
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the average American smartphone owner spends more than 42 minutes a day on the site, and that Facebook accounts for one out of every five minutes spent on a smartphone.
While Facebook officials say that their site should not necessarily be the "only way" people get news, market trends are increasingly moving in favor of a more dominant role and greater market penetration by the firm.
Recently, a number of prominent companies including Buzzfeed and the NYT said they would begin hosting their work directly on
Facebook.
The Times noted that while news organizations are attracted by the prospect of working with Facebook to boost readership, it also makes them nervous.
And, according to Pew, there's plenty of reason for them to be worried:
"While new relationships have been struck between news organizations and tech companies like Facebook, the tech companies still control more of the arrangement and reap most of the financial benefit."
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