Sharing news: people are doing it.

More research is being undertaken to try and understand how people are reading news online these days, with the latest study showing once again that Facebook is a lot more important than Twitter when it comes to directing traffic to news websites (but that Google is still the biggest driver by far).

This research has been done by the Pew Research Centre’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, using stats compiled by the Nielsen Company. Unfortunately is is US centric, focusing on the 25 biggest news websites in the States, but it is interesting what it shows about audience behaviour.

It’s not the first time that research has shown how important Facebook is for driving traffic to news sites, but it is interesting to see how ‘sharing’ stories is becoming common.

The study says: “At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.

The bad news for media owners who are banking on paywalls to make written news profitable again is that audiences continue to be fickle – it found that even the biggest sites depend heavily on casual users, with, for example, USAToday.com having 85% of its users visit the site between one and three times a month. That is not how you’re going to sell a paywall subscription.

What publishers will be most interested in is probably the study’s attempt to segment the online news reading audience into four groups, which will each need a different strategy to be monetized.