DIGIDAY – 19/12/2019
Deanna Ting
This November, Inquisitr CEO Dominick Miserandino noticed that TopBuzz News, the news aggregator app from ByteDance, the same company behind wildly popular short-form video app TikTok, was its No. 1 referral source, driving 23% of traffic, topping Facebook and Google. At the same time last year, TopBuzz was only driving 0.14% of traffic.
Inquisitr isn’t the only publisher seeing more of its traffic being driven from mobile news aggregators like TopBuzz, News Break, Flipboard and SmartNews, all of which have emerged as quietly potent traffic drivers for some publishers. The days of simply relying on traffic from Google or Facebook are long gone and smart publishers are proactively diversifying their traffic sources.