"Seeing More Politics in Your News Feed? Facebook Boosts Partisan Sites"

From Mashable:

Facebook has helped catapult sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy into social stardom, boosting the visibility of media content on the News Feeds of millions of users and generating a deluge of traffic. But in this rising tide, some publishers have seen a particular lift: political sites on both the left and right.

As digital-native publishers have soared, media sites with a political bent are outpacing some viral competitors while picking up a few of their tricks along the way. Sites like Business Insider helped pioneer social media strategies, but outlets ranging from Glenn Beck's The Blaze to 38-year-old Mother Jones have been fast learners.

When Facebook tweaked the algorithm that runs its News Feed last year, Internet publishers received a sudden influx of traffic from users clicking through from the social network. Digital-native sites like BuzzFeed and Business Insider were thought to be the primary beneficiaries, having been pioneers in creating highly shareable content.

But "few sites have capitalized on this new audience channel like these political sites," Liam Corcoran, social media editor at NewsWhip, wrote in an email. "The likes of The Blaze and Think Progress manage to challenge the likes of USA Today and NPR, despite their relatively low monthly output. Each story is carefully crafted and presented to appeal to potential readers scrolling through their news feed."

Data from NewsWhip, which monitors the spread of news on social platforms, shows that Facebook interactions — likes, shares and comments — have risen dramatically for sites that tend to favor one side of the political spectrum.

Mother Jones stands out as the biggest riser, leaping from around 230,000 monthly Facebook interactions to more than 1.9 million, up more than 700% from August 2013 to May 2014. Fox News rose almost 280% in that same period, followed by increases of 172% from Huffington Post and 117% from Breitbart. Those outlets still lag far behind BuzzFeed, which received about 25 million interactions in May, topped by Huffington Post's 32 million....MORE