The Press Gazette has published an article on the demise of Facebook as a source of traffic to news sites.
Facebook has been a significant source of referral traffic for news publishers for many years.
However, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been shifting its focus away from the news industry.
This has resulted in a significant drop in Facebook‘s referral traffic for news publishers, as confirmed by data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb.
The analysis shows that for 1,350 global publishers included in Chartbeat‘s data, 27% of page views coming from external, search and social in January 2018 came from Facebook, which equated to 2 billion page views.
However, by April 2023, this figure had plummeted to 11%, representing only 1.5 billion page views.
The decline in traffic from Facebook has impacted publishers of all sizes, but smaller publishers have been hit the hardest.
The data shows that across 486 small publishers, with less than 10,000 average daily page views, Facebook referral traffic in April represented just 2% of its volume at the start of 2018.
For the largest publishers, with over 100,000 average daily page views, this was down by 24%, while for medium-sized outlets, between 10,000 and 100,000 average daily page views, the fall was 46%.
The closure of Buzzfeed News highlights the precarious position of publishers who rely on social media platforms for referral traffic.
Similarweb’s social referral data for desktop visits only, which account for a minority of web traffic, shows a clear trend of falling visits to Buzzfeed News from Facebook, from 261,669 in April 2021 to 124,825 in March 2023.
Buzzfeed.com saw a similar dip, with Facebook referrals falling by 70% in the same period.
Changes to Facebook’s algorithm and its move away from news have also hit publishers on the platform.
In 2014, Facebook changed its algorithm to reduce “clickbait”, which affected the traffic of viral publishers such as Upworthy and Buzzfeed.
In 2018, another update was designed to prioritize content from “family and friends” over that from publishers in its News Feed, further hitting the news industry.
In 2022, Facebook announced that it would be dropping Instant Articles, which allows news links to open in a quicker-to-load, mobile-friendly format within the Facebook app.
Last month, Meta commissioned a report that claimed news content plays a “small and diminishing role” on its platform.
The report was published shortly before the introduction of new UK legislation designed to force Meta and Google to pay publishers for the use of their news content.
The report authors estimated that publishers derive on average 1% to 1.5% of their total revenue from referrals back to their websites from content shared on Facebook.
Overall, Facebook’s diminishing role has affected not only the traffic of news publishers but also social media-dependent publishers’ overall audiences.
The data also suggests that Facebook’s importance among social networks has been falling.
For example, in April 2020, 95% of Ladbible’s desktop social referrals came from Facebook, but this figure fell to 49% in March 2023. Similarly, sun.co.uk’s figure fell from 75% to 25%, and for the Daily Mail, the share fell from 59% to 19%.