Traffic for publishers, these days, is Google, Facebook and the rest. In that all-the-rest category, Yahoo is driving more traffic than originally thought.
On June 2, Yahoo added a referral tag to its homepage, so now it can get credit for that traffic, Chartbeat explained in a blog post. When Yahoo moved its site to https two years ago, designed to protect users’ privacy and security, its referral traffic began to show up as unattributed, or dark traffic.
As a result, Yahoo went from being the No. 16 referral source for publishers to No. 6 on June 2, after Facebook, Google Search, Twitter, Google News and Bing. This is based on traffic across a sample of 5,000 sites that are representative of the 50,000 sites that Chartbeat measures.
The morning of June 3, Yahoo jumped to third place, after Google Search and Facebook and ahead of Twitter and Google News, representing 4.3 percent of the top five traffic referral sources. Let’s be clear: Yahoo is no Facebook.
“Anecdotally, it’s known they’re big but hard to know how successful it is because a very large proportion of their traffic wasn’t attributed,” said Dan Valente, director of data science at Chartbeat. “Now you know.”
For publishers, it’s all the more reason to value Yahoo as a traffic source. For Yahoo, it’s a bit of welcome news to tout, at a time when its financial performance is in the tank and a for-sale sign has attracted a few bidders.
More in Media
Digiday+ Research: Publishers take their focus off events as revenue dips
The percentage of publishers making money from events hit a low as of the first quarter of this year and, as a result, fewer publishers plan on putting a focus on growing that part of their business.
What platforms, brands and agencies hope to get out of the Possible conference in year 2
Year two of Possible is once again being held in Miami Beach, and it will take place from April 15-17 with 3,000 attendees expected to listen to another 200 or so speakers, including Snap’s Colleen DeCourcy, Uber Ads’ Megan Ramm and UM Worldwide’s Matthew Smith.
AI Briefing: Cloud giants’ AI ambitions create new partnerships — and new competitive concerns
Last week, tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon all announced updates more updates for their cloud and AI efforts