Ben Adler has written a wonderful long-form piece on news readership behavior among the younger generation of content consumers, entitled "Streams of consciousness."
In it, he points out a number of important truths about online media today.
Sharing content is a way of expressing an aspect of one's character. Content does not merely have to be "good" to be shared -- it also has to express something about the sharer.
Content has gone multi-type and multi-platform in a big way: not just text, image & video, but desktop, mobile & tablet.
A side effect: more traffic comes through the side doors (individual articles) than front door (homepage). This makes intuitive sense. Audiences are less loyal to brands, and are discovering content through search, social, aggregators, often due to timely or topical relevance rather than brand affinity.
The way to think about online content today is as a mighty river, with many fragmented streams forking off small subsets of content in a variety of directions due to platform, context, topic, and time.
Read "Streams of consciousness"...