Note to AP, Media: Bloggers/Search Engines R Your Best Friends

Facebook is becoming an increasingly important source of traffic for media sites, including CNN.com and the NYTimes.com, according to Compete’s figures for July. The continuing significance of Google and Yahoo is apparent for every media company I’ve checked.

At CNN, for example, the top three drivers of traffic are Google (10.05 percent), Facebook (8.13 percent), and Yahoo (6.85 percent). These three thus account for a quarter of all incoming via links for the cable news site. Compete rates cnn.com as the 26th largest U.S. website by traffic.

The New York Times is even more dependent, with 31 percent of its online traffic referrals from the three sites, with Google (19.37 percent) by far the major source, followed by Yahoo (6.12 percent) and Facebook (5.3 percent). Compete ranks nytimes.com as the 64th largest U.S. website.

Facebook increased its share of CNN’s referrals by 27.56 percent in July, and its share of the NYT’s by 5.47 percent.

Over at the Associated Press, given all the recent controversy over the wire service’s new linking policy, it is notable that the third largest source of traffic (after Yahoo and Google) to AP’s portal, ap.org, is Technorati, the blog search engine. AP execs may want to factor this information into their next round of actions — bloggers, as well as social media sites, are indeed some of the media’s very best online friends.

Compete ranked ap.org as the 633rd largest U.S. website as of July.