A site owned by the parent company of TikTok is a growing source of traffic for media publishers, and recently became the largest referral source for Inquisitr media. 

Dominick Miserandino, CEO at mid-size publisher The Inquisitr, said the road to publishing is rocky, but diversifying the origin of the traffic to the site changes everything. Since taking this strategy and not worrying that the majority of the site’s traffic comes from Google, the company has managed to increase revenue by 60% year-over-year and growth by 40% YoY.

“Google is no longer an exclusive source for traffic,” he said. “We have a market that says ‘Google,’ ‘Google,’ ‘Google,’ but the answer isn’t always Google.”

Traffic from TopBuzz, a TikTok sister company, seems to like celebratory news, but nothing too unique. Miserandino looks to see how content ranks and what people search for to get to The Inquisitr. On Google he looks for certain keywords, but on TopBuzz it’s about article headlines and subjects.

“We started seeing traffic come to the site, but we’re always looking for new possibilities to generate traffic,” Miserandino said. “I run a business based on diversification. The nature of the source of traffic isn’t as relevant, meaning TopBuzz or Google or Flipboard.”

No traffic source — search engine, social network and others like Clipboard — contributes more than 25% today, he said, which includes Google and Facebook.    

“A lot of competitors are dying, in part, because they have rely on one source,” he said.

The Inquisitr now supports more than 20 million website visits monthly, he said, but declined to break out the numbers for desktop versus mobile. Some say it’s 33.6 million website visits, but who’s counting?

Miserandino acknowledges that mobile is on the rise, and that’s probably why the TopBuzz app is having such a strong influence on the company’s traffic diversification strategy.