News aggregator Drudge Report, which employs two people in addition to founder Matt Drudge, continues to be one of the largest traffic drivers to content sites, according to a study released Wednesday by Outbrain.

Drudge Report, which gained notoriety for publishing the first report on the Monica Lewinsky scandal during the Clinton presidency, was responsible for 6.85% of traffic within Outbrain's publisher network. And that's a roster that includes The New York Times Media Group, The Atlantic, MSNBC and Mashable.

It's an impressive number for a site made up of a handful of pages plastered with text links. By comparison, it's driving more than double the traffic to content sites than Facebook and Twitter combined. And Drudge Report's influence is growing; its share of total traffic referrals is up 1.5% from the first part of the year.

The study shows that social networks still drive relatively little traffic (7%) compared to content sites (56%) and search (37%). Readers who go from one content site to another are more likely to be engaged with what they're reading, "presumably because they are already in content-consumption mode," the study noted.

That's not true everywhere, of course. CNN attributes 43% of its incoming news traffic to social channels.

Among social networks, Twitter came up on top (1.69% of all traffic referrals), followed by Reddit (1.10%) and then Facebook (1.07%).







When asked why Facebook ranked so low, Outbrain COO David Sasson suggested that Twitter is better designed for content consumption.

"Twitter is fundamentally a broadcast medium, where people are … following [other] people in order to get the content they put out. You want to receive links to content, and you’re likely to click on them," Sasson said.

"Facebook, on the other hand, is [more for] hearing what your friends are doing, sharing a dialogue or personal photos with them — not finding content. That happens, certainly, but as a secondary effect, not a primary one. So it could be that while Facebook has a much bigger audience, the people there are not as interested in using Facebook to find content as the people who use Twitter expressly for that purpose," he said.

A source at Facebook suggested that the numbers are simply inaccurate, and Outbrain has agreed to look over its Facebook numbers again.

The study also found that across all content verticals, tech content receives the highest share of social traffic (12% compared to the 7% average), echoing a study conducted by Pew last year. News and sports received the least attention from social channels, comparatively, suggesting how the interests of social media users skew.