Parse.ly’s chief technical officer Andrew Montalenti said in an interview with Fortune that according to the company’s latest estimates, social-media sources (of which Facebook was by far the largest) accounted for about 43 per cent of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for only 38 per cent.

However, it’s not simply about top market share, it’s a contest between social referrals and search engine referrals.

The social network also slightly extended its lead in referral traffic over Google, new Parse.ly data shows.

“I believe the reason Facebook did this is because they realized that a lot of the interesting conversations happening around the web were happening around major news, media and information, but the user-generated content was not enough to sustain the interest of Facebook’s user’s population”. That included conventional publishers like The Daily Telegraph, Reuters, The Atlantic, Wired, and a big group of digital outlets like Mashable, Business Insider, and The Next Web.

While Montalenti said he expects Facebook to continue developing its publisher relationships and prioritize content in the News Feed, he noted that the growth trend might have peaked and that Facebook will maintain a position as a the top referral source alongside Google. “And yet it’s this huge and growing traffic source”, he said. Therefore, it is not growing as a referral source for media. Hence the Parse.ly data can not be set aside and mirrors changing trends applicable to the media universe.

One piece of good news for Facebook is not all new traffic funneled to the digital sites is free.

It’s still under debate if this kind of traffic is the best there is, because analysts argue about the likelihood that a reader who comes from Facebook will remain on a media site or go back to the original platform. Google on the other hand can drive traffic to different websites because of the long tail effect of search.

BuzzFeed, for example, spent millions of dollasr last year to promote its clients’ ads, according to internal financial documents published by Gawker, and many other digital publications will occasionally pay to boost well-performing posts.

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