Facebook drives massive traffic

TechCrunch recently asked Gigya to survey the power of sharing widgets accross a massive network of content sites. According to the results, about 40-45% of the traffic generated from sharing is coming from facebook shares, with the remainder largely going to Twitter and some additional traffic coming from ancillary services like Yahoo! and Myspace. One of the reasons that Google has pushed so hard recently to enter the social networking world with Buzz is because of the amount of traffic that social sharing is generating. For many content driven sites the amount of traffic driven from search engines is vastly lower than the amount of traffic driven from social bookmarking and social sharing through widgets.

Eric makes an excellent point about the usefulness of having an authentication platform such as facebook connect which allows you to easily connect to websites and with the click of a button, you can share content that you’ve read or created on facebook. More importantly, by sharing on facebook, you’ve got the ability to quickly and easily select who you’d like to share with, in most instances. The article also gives a good breakdown of the authentication platform of choice for users of various sites broken into categories like News, Entertainment and Live Events.