Google continues to provide the greatest outside source of traffic for news companies worldwide, according to the latest annual report released by global press group World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) Annual Report

According to the report, Google was responsible for two out of every three page views newsrooms received in 2018 (about 66 percent). Facebook accounted for about 30 percent of publishers’ outside traffic. Only about three percent of newsrooms’ traffic came from Twitter.

“Worldwide, Google provides 25 times the traffic for publishers that Twitter does and almost two and a half times that which Facebook does,” the report read. “Although there is wide concern about the behavior of Facebook, the advertising and e-commerce social media giant only accounts for roughly 30 percent of traffic for digital news across online platforms."

The report discovered that Google’s influence on newsroom traffic is highest in Africa, where the search engine delivers about 75 percent of news publishers’ traffic. Google accounts for the least amount of outside traffic in Asia, where mainland China banned the site in 2010.

Newsroom revenues dipped across the globe by about three percent last year, according to the report. However, audiences that paid for news subscriptions worldwide (print and digital combined) actually grew by about five percent overall last year. That growth came essentially from digital, which was up 11 percent in 2018 and has grown a whipping 208 percent since 2014.

Print circulation dipped globally by about one percent last year, following print advertising’s ongoing decline, which fell by about seven percent in 2018. The report found that print circulation is actually on the rise in some countries, particularly in large developing countries such as India and China.

Print revenues still account for about 86 percent of newspapers’ overall revenue worldwide, according to the report. And a little more than half (54 percent) of global newspapers’ overall revenue came from circulation sales in 2018, which is expected to dip by about two percent in 2019.

The WAN-IFRA report also found that 1,283 daily newspapers remain in the U.S., a loss of 20 percent—or one out of every five newspapers —from the 1,626 daily papers that were in circulation 30 years ago.

WAN-IFRA’s “World Press Trends 2019” report analyzed data and news circulation trends from 248 countries provided by content analytics firm Chartbeat as well as from WAN-IFRA’s global survey of publishers.