5 charts that show how social media rules publishing

digiday reporting:
The New York Times may deny that it’s playing the BuzzFeed game, but there’s no getting around the fact that with the homepage declining in importance as a source of publishers’ traffic, the pressure to use social media to find readers has never been greater...
This shift is happening as their employers are becoming increasingly dependent on social media for traffic. In September 2013, the eight biggest social referrers drove 16.4 percent of traffic to publishers’ sites, according to Shareaholic, which measured traffic across more than 200 sites of varying audience sizes. A year later, that number had nearly doubled, to 29.5 percent. Facebook is in a class all its own: It drove more than 22 percent of referrals to publishers, with Pinterest a distant second....
The sites that are winning on Facebook are digital-native, viral sites, led by The Huffington Post, which had more than 42 million total likes, shares and comments in December...
http://digiday.com/publishers/5-charts-show-social-media-rules-publishers/