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Search traffic to publishers has taken a dive in the last eight months, with traffic from Google dropping more than 30% from August 2012 through March 2013, according to research done by BuzzFeed. While Google makes up the bulk of search traffic to publishers, traffic from all search engines has dropped by 20% in the same period.

Of the three major search engines — Google, Yahoo and Bing — only Yahoo saw growth in this period. While Yahoo grew search traffic in this period, it sent 21M referrals to publishers in March, less than half of the 48M referrals sent by Google. Traffic from Bing dropped 12%.

In the past, we've reported how referrals from social platforms like Facebook to the BuzzFeed Network were growing, and at times sending more traffic than search. While that difference was at times marginal — 5 to 10M referrals — its now sustained and significant. In March, Facebook sent 1.5x more traffic than Google, the greatest difference we've ever measured between the platforms. At the same time, we've watched traffic from other social platforms — Twitter and Pinterest -—continue to grow an audience and drive traffic traffic to publishers. "Dark social," that netherland of direct traffic, is also accelerating on the network, growing referral traffic to publishers by 52% over the past twelve months. By comparison, referrals from social platforms, i.e. the Facebooks, Twitters, Pinterests and Reddits of the world, grew by 25%. It begs the question, could direct traffic be taking the place of search?

Recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithms have lavished online publishers with unprecedented referral traffic, creating a ripple effect throughout the news industry. In September, stately newspaper sites set a digital traffic record, seeing an 11% gain in visitors since June, while Facebook referrals from BuzzFeed’s diverse partner network of sites increased by 69% from August to October.

But traffic-bound publishers are growing anxious that yet another algorithm change could erase the big gains of the last few months — that traffic could disappear just as quickly as it came. “We’re starting to get very nervous,” one staffer at a major paper told BuzzFeed. “It’s scary that they can get everyone hooked on such high referral traffic then take it away so quickly with a quick flip of their algorithm,”

“They’re gonna keep tinkering with the algorithm, so I expect the referral surge will taper off. I’m not worried, though. Facebook has a hundred billion reasons why they need to support ‘high-quality content,’ which means they won’t abandon publishers anytime soon.”

research suggests that readers prefer their tablets' Web browsers to the meaty, slow-to-update and even more slow-to-evolve native apps that publishers have been eagerly developing since Steve Jobs first held up the iPad on stage in 2010.

Inspired by the Netflix model, magazine subscription service Next Issue launched on iOS in July. For $10 per month, readers can get access to dozens of magazines from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc. and Hearst. This approach comes with challenges of its own, but it's certainly worth a try. 

Then there's The Magazine. Instapaper founder Marco Arment launched the stripped-down, iPad-only publication in October and it couldn't be more simple. For $2 per month, readers are promised eight thoughtful, well-written articles delivered in bi-weekly issues. The Magazine eschews the clunky, multimedia-loaded digital editions of print magazines in favor of a no-frills, high quality reading experience that Arment hopes people will think is good enough to pay for.

Digg sent 1.4 million referrals to publishers in February 2013, compared with 75,000 referrals in February 2012.

While Digg remains behind both StumbleUpon and Fark, which sent between 2 and 3 million referrals to publishers in February, it's growing while these platforms are not. And to put the referral numbers in additional context, Digg is now on par with Tumblr, a platform with more than 100 million users, in terms of referral traffic. Tumblr sent 1.3 million referrals to network publishers in February.

Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

ideally you want to post content around noon or early evening. If you post a status message or share a link to an article at noon, you're more likely to catch business professionals on a lunch break who are looking to catch up their online social networks. Early evening, starting between 5 P.M. to 6 P.M. is another great time of the day to publish content to LinkedIn, because you are catching users at the end of their work day.

The worst time to post content or share links with your LinkedIn connections is between the hours of 10 P.M. to 6 A.M., as most business professionals are sleeping during the night time hours. These hours are considered the "dead zone" according KISSmetrics

The best days to post to LinkedIn are midweek from Tuesday to Thursday. Mondays are not a good day to post content you want eyeballs looking at, because most professionals are getting back into the work week grind. Fridays are not good days to publish important content either, mainly because most professionals leave the office early to start the weekend. However, Saturday and Sunday can be good days to post content, as some users want to catch up with their social networking on the weekend.

A new study shows that readers find their minds wandering when using iPad versions of magazines. Publishers had always figured that the iPad magazine, being an interactive experience, would necessarily be different from the print incarnation, with readers bouncing around a bit. But the reality exceeds even that expectation.

"We thought that of course there's a lot of activity going on on an iPad, when there's so many things you can be doing -- between email, Netflix, playing games, reading magazines -- but they're actually bouncing around a lot more than we thought,"

the hope for many in publishing was that iPad magazines would be so engrossing that they would be "sticky," holding an audience captive similar to the way paper magazines do. In the ideal, rosiest scenario, from both the editorial and advertising standpoint, iPad magazines would lure readers, keep them there, draw their attention to elegant ads, and occasionally lead to direct purchases as a result of that ad.

Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites.

These recommendations, Sternberg told me, are based on social recommendations on the site from your friends on Google+ (only if you are signed in, of course), what the story you just read was about, the story’s author and some of Google’s “secret sauce.”

The new Google+-based recommendations, interestingly, only appear once a reader slides back up on a page. This, Google’s analytics show, is a pretty good indicator that a user has finished reading a post (even if there is still more text left on the page). The recommendation widget then slides up from the bottom and one extra click brings up more relevant items for the page. The other option is to show the widget after a user scrolls past a configurable CSS entity.

"Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words," says Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University. "When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest."

This trend toward the visual is also influenced by the shifting habits of technology users. As more people engage with social media via smartphones, they're discovering that taking a picture "on the go" using a high-resolution phone is much less tedious than typing out a status update on a two-inch keyboard.

"The need for publishers to get to the point quicker than ever came about as humans became more pressed for time and content became more infinite. For publishers, it was evolve or risk losing their audience, and the only thing shorter than a tweet or post is a picture."

Tools to publish better content: All the metrics for positive interactions (likes, comments, shares and clicks) and negative interactions (hide post, hide all posts, report as spam, unlike page) have been aggregated into a post-specific score card. Facebook says this lets marketers evaluate positive and negative metrics side-by-side for each post. Insights about people interacting with your page: Page Insights now allows administrators see not only who they’ve reached but also who they have engaged. This should be useful for figuring out how content resonates with different audiences.

Facebook's Newsfeed algorithm, formerly called EdgeRank

It's becoming apparent that there's a still a misconception in some circles around the idea that Facebook is an agnostic platform—akin to a public plaza—that doesn't systematically curate the user experience. Indeed, it's become safe to say that the Menlo Park, Calif.-based digital giant is tweaking its algorithm to highlight content in a fashion that's not unlike a newspaper or magazine's online presence.

just as Google has reworked its search algorithm over the years to the chagrin of SEO marketers, Facebook's maneuvers are now making publishers rethink their Newsfeed strategies. Whether more ad spend is the result of this thought process remains to be seen.

with the top 20 publishers seeing a staggering increase in social interactions (likes, comments, shares) of 288 percent between September 2012 and September 2013.

on average, referral traffic from Facebook to media sites has increased by over 170 percent throughout the past year.

Gawker posted the largest year-to-year growth in Facebook engagement, at 549 percent, followed by BuzzFeed at 495 percent. “Old media” stalwarts The New York Times and the British Broadcasting Corp. delivered strong performances, as well, seeing increases of 160 percent and 122 percent, respectively. The Huffington Post was the strongest performer for the month of September 2013, generating nearly 18.5 million social interactions from 15,839 published articles.

the stand-alone website, in all of its pixilated glory, is becoming obsolete. Yes, you do need something for potential customers to bring up in their browsers when they type in companynamedotcom. But you also don't need to put a lot of effort into its creation. Here is why.

The days of building community are happening outside of your own dot com. It used to be that you created brand awareness and a destination for your customers by having your own site. No longer. Now, there are plenty of others who will do it for you, and often they will do so without you having to pay them.

Yes, she does have her own business website. She does need it to give her business a sense of legitimacy and purpose. But that site gets dozens of visitors a week, rather than the hundreds or thousands that the other sites do.

Valuable content on a site you own is a classic win-win for readers and the site owner, while publishing original material on Facebook is a lopsided relationship that favors Zuckerberg and his data-hoarding cronies. Social networking is highly useful for driving traffic back to your own web asset (and we use various platforms to do just that). But I have no interest in becoming someone’s user-generated content, especially at the expense of my privacy … or my business.