Social media drove more referrals than search for 2015’s biggest news stories
Parse.ly tracks and analyses the site traffic of more than 400 publishers, including Business Insider, Reuters, The Atlantic, and New Republic. The results:

For the study, Parse.ly said it identified the top seven news events of the year based on the most-read stories in its network. “We only considered stories that had one ‘event’ at their core (sorry Donald Trump and the Kardashian clan!), then we normalised the data based on site size because we didn’t want our biggest sites to dictate the trends,” the company said in a blog post.
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