Organic search drives 7 out of 10 visits?<p>I'm a little skeptical of that statistic.<p>I wish Outbrain had updated reports that I could use (I wasn't able to find any;) however, pulling from an older study from 2011, they reported Search and Social numbers that seem very different than what Conductor's study dictates. Search was at 40% and Social was at 14% for their top 150 Publishers at the time. [1] If search more than doubled in 18 months, there would be quite a bit of coverage on such a substantial gain. I've had my head down to work for a while, so maybe I missed the undoubted hype that would have surrounded such a gain?<p>I do believe the idea that the 'fat head' drives the majority of traffic. I'm simply questioning the accuracy of the breakdown of referring traffic sources.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/08/content-sites-refer-traffic-other-content-pages-googles-share-drops.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.outbrain.com/blog/2011/08/content-sites-refer-tra...</a>
This is a simple case of default settings. Not much has changed over the years. He who controls the operating system/browser controls the portal and hence the referral.<p>As well-known and popular as Google is as a portal, they still need to play the default settings game. Android and Chrome are Google's way of making sure google.tld is a default setting.<p>One could argue that in the majority of cases, those 1% of domains are not chosen by the user, but by he who controls th default settings.