Facebook has released some intersting stats on its Open Graph features for media partners, which include Yahoo! News, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Independent, and The Daily,  that it announced at f8. We already know that Facebook is a major driver of news traffic with twice as many getting their news via Facebook than any of social network, but the amount of traffic it is drving on a daily basis is striking.

The Guardian is picking up around one million pageviews a day while the Washington Post is getting 3.5 million monthly readers for its social reader app. The Independent has in excess of one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts and Yahoo News has seen a 600% increase in traffic.

That provides traffic that papers like the Guardian can sell ads against and it is also sending younger readers their way.

Facebook rightly says the results highlight that news sites which focus on building social and personalised news experiences will see the most dramatic increases in traffic and engagement:

• The Guardian: Built an app for Facebook.com and has been installed by nearly four million people, generating, on average, almost a million extra page impressions every day. Additionally, over half of the app’s users are 24 and under, “traditionally a very hard-to-reach demographic for news organizations,” said Andrew Miller, chief executive officer of Guardian Media Group. There more on the Guardian’s success on Media Week.

• Washington Post: Built the Social Reader app for Facebook as a companion for its website and has drawn more than 3.5 million monthly active users so far. The Social Reader continues to grow, especially among international audiences and younger readers, with 83% of readers under 35 years old.
  

Engaging users on existing websites:

• Yahoo! News: Built a deep Open Graph integration into its site and more than ten million people have chosen to turn on the new social news experience to share and discover news from friends. Yahoo! News has seen a 600% increase in traffic coming from Facebook, and people who connect to Facebook on Yahoo! read more articles than the average user.
  
• The Independent: More than one million monthly active users are connecting their Facebook accounts to the new social news experience on independent.co.uk. The integration has bumped up older articles that have gone viral through social distribution. The organization found that many of the “most shared” and “most viewed” stories on the site have been from the late 1990s, a result of the increased social virality.