Friends, not editors, shape Internet habits

With social media on the rise, traditional Internet portals such as Yahoo and AOL, once the front doors to the online world, are being spurned in favor of social sites, where users are discovering a new, more personal filter to the infinite world of the Internet. This behavioral change has forced content providers to adapt quickly. Rather than assuming that users will seek out their content, media organizations - from the big international newspaper groups, down to the small local publications - are now actively promoting their content on social networks, and encouraging readers to distribute links to their friends. It is de rigueur for news websites to be embedded with devices that automatically publish articles to social networks such as Facebook and Twitter and to content sharing websites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.