Is the "power" of social media is a relative concept? Those that are involved in it, that read Digg, Reddit, Newsvine, and the ilk would certainly say it is a breakthrough in the distribution of information. However, only 22% of the Top 50 Newspapers (by circulation), have any form of social bookmarking integration aside from a simple "email this article" link.

I spent an hour or so mindlessly clicking and compiled a table of the Top 50 Newspapers in America and their level of social bookmarking integration:
Option 1: Google Spreadsheet
Option 2: PDF

In summary, every single online edition of newspaper had a link to email the article to people (except the WSJ which wanted me to pay to read it), but very few had "Digg it" buttons or similar links. The most logical explanation is that newspapers don't try to drive additional traffic from social media simply because the traffic isn't worth very much.

I don't mean that in the sense that traffic from Digg et al doesn't do anything other than leech bandwidth; such traffic simply isn't profitable. When compared to the dead tree form, online advertising is not all that profitable for newspapers despite their online distribution being nearly limitless.

Daily Newspaper Advertising Revenue 1984 – 2005
Source: State of the Media


Online Ad Revenue, 1997-2005
Source: State of the Media


The most striking aspect of these graphs is that the Online Ad Revenue graph depicts the total amount of advertising online, not merely for newspapers. This says two things about the Internet:
1) Social media doesn't really matter to the real world (yet).
2) Companies like to make money and maximize their cost to profit ratio.

When it can be easily seen that the newspaper industry makes 379% more than the total revenue from online advertising in a year ($47.4 billion vs. $12.5 billion), it's not hard to understand why they don't put more effort into driving traffic to their websites with social media.

That being said, there is some value in social media and user generated content. For the moment, big corporate media doesn't seem to care about such things, the blog-o-sphere is growing rapidly and may one day truly matter in the journalistic scheme of things.

It is rather depressing that as I sit here writing this article I am writing about my own insignificance. However, I have encountered something during my exploration of this topic that I should remember: blogging only really matters to bloggers and people that spend a significant portion of their lives on the internet.

So, I have presented my evidence of the current insignificant of the blogging and social media, especially from the perspective of corporate media, and now it's your turn to answer the question: does it really matter?