The Top 50 publishers on the web got a little bit more social traffic this month – but social as a  proportion of total traffic stayed about the same in August as it was in July.

Notable Exception:  MTV

MTV bucked the trend by adding 2.5 percentage points to their social composition and earning the #2 spot on the Social Leaderboard.  Reigning silver medalist People lost the #2 spot by standing still at 10.3% social – they fell to third.  CBS held fourth place by adding 1 percentage point, and NFL dropped the ball and backslid into fifth place, dropping 1.4 percentage points in social composition.  (More on that below, but in the mean time, let’s blame the replacements.)

Wetpaint Entertainment also went against the grain and added more than 10 percentage points to social composition in August – we’re now getting 45.1% of our traffic from Facebook and Twitter.  Notably, that’s more traffic from social than from search.

Lately a number of people have asked me whether we are doing the same thing to earn our traffic as famous social ninja Jonah Peretti’s BuzzFeed.  Actually, Wetpaint has a totally different approach to social:  BuzzFeed focuses on choosing content that will go viral, while Wetpaint’s platform builds loyal tune-in relationships.  But in honor of all the questions, I’ve added BuzzFeed to the charts below.  Their social traffic composition backs up their social-savvy reputation and puts most of the Leaderboard publishers to shame.

Average Social Volume Gain: 40,000 Visitors

In terms of social traffic volume, the average publisher was up just slightly (by 40K social visitors) in August.  The Huffington Post held steady at the top with 7.6 million visitors from Facebook and Twitter.  For the NFL, this chart revealed that while they added a ton of social volume (1.7 million visits, to be exact) and jumped from 14^th place to 5^th place on this chart, they swelled their other traffic even more.  Wetpaint Entertainment muscled into the top 10 and claimed the #8 spot in social volume with 2.5 million social visitors in August – just 10K shy of #7 MTV.