How Facebook Traffic to Publishers Has Changed

As the largest social media platform in the U.S., Facebook has long played a critical role in the distribution strategies of publishers, though the relationship between the two parties has fluctuated significantly over time. In May, reports surfaced that Facebook, eyeing market instability and a fierce new challenger in TikTok, was reevaluating its practice of paying news publishers to participate in its News tab. The reversal mirrored another change in strategy from the company when, in August 2021, it announced plans to further diminish the visibility of political news in its users’ feeds. The cumulative effect of these shifts in policy has been to reduce the prominence of news on the platform, which constitutes about 4% of the content in users’ feeds, according to Shelley Venus, the director of global news strategy at Meta. The move aligns with a larger reinvention of the platform, as Facebook seeks to pivot from serving as a forum for interacting with friends and family to acting as a discovery engine, a service predicated on exposing users to content created by others on the platform. Despite these changes, Facebook remains a critical tool for news publishers, and the website remains their primary source of social referral traffic, said Bonnie Ray, vice president of data science at the web analytics firm Chartbeat. In May, for example, 87% of traffic to sites in the Chartbeat network that came from social referrers came from Facebook. Why Publishers’ Ad Revenues Skyrocketed Last Year, in 5 Charts As the two parties enter a new era, the charts below help illustrate the ways their relationship has changed over time. The data, compiled by measurement firms Comscore, Chartbeat and NewsWhip, lends historical context to their current dynamic. Although Facebook has taken steps to distance itself from the news media and recast itself as an analogous to TikTok, the reality is more complex, and the platform remains integral to publishers looking to tap into its vast audience. Traffic to most publishers spiked in 2020 By tracking the traffic of several premium publishers over a multi-year period, the data above illustrates a key pattern across the industry: With a few exceptions, most media companies saw their traffic rise to historic heights in 2020 before declining and settling at a level slightly higher than its pre-pandemic figures. This backdrop helps contextualize the changes to traffic coming from Facebook, as referrals from the social platform mirrored this larger industry-wide trend. As you will see below, the last two years have seen a steady decrease in the amount of traffic heading to publishers from Facebook, but traffic in that time period dropped across the industry––the decrease is not exclusive to Facebook referrals. Overall traffic from Facebook to publishers is declining In line with larger trends, the volume of referral traffic coming from Facebook to publishers has dropped since reaching a peak in 2020. However, despite the current downward trajectory, the amount of total traffic Facebook sends publishers has increased compared to the pre-pandemic era—roughly 11% from May 2019 to May 2022, according to Tania Yuki, the chief marketing officer and evp of digital at Comscore. There are a number of potential explanations for the post-2020 slide, said Nic Newman, the senior research assistant at Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. News fatigue has led to decreased news consumption in the U.S., and Facebook has deprioritized news on its platform in response. Facebook has also lost users to new platforms like TikTok, and those who continue to use the platform spend less time on it. “In our 2022 Digital News Report, we looked at which social networks people use to consume the news,” Newman said. “What you see is that Facebook is still No. 1, but it has lost 12 percentage points in three years, whereas the other platforms have stayed pretty much the same.” The percentage of publishers’ traffic from Facebook has dropped More telling than the sheer volume of traffic coming from Facebook is the percentage of publishers’ traffic that comes from the site. While traffic declined throughout the industry, the percentage of traffic that publishers get from Facebook has also dropped, indicating that it has become slightly less valuable as a referrer. In early 2018, Facebook accounted for nearly 25% of publishers’ traffic. That figure has steadily dropped, and the platform now accounts for between 18% and 20% of total external traffic, a percentage that has held fairly steady over the last 12 to 18 months. Social media, in general, has declined in importance as a source of referral traffic, according to Ray. While Facebook is still the most important source of social media referrals, overall traffic from social media has diminished while traffic from search has increased. “Facebook is still head and shoulders above its competitors,” Ray said. “But we are definitely seeing some slight declines in the percentage of overall traffic that is being referred through Facebook to publishers.” Engagement on news articles has declined In addition to referring less traffic overall, Facebook has also seen engagement on news articles decline, according to data from NewsWhip. The data does not include engagement from Reels or publishers’ Facebook pages, but instead measures how many engagements an average article receives when a Facebook user shares it, said Benedict Nicholson, the head of content and research at NewsWhip. This drop in engagement could come from a number of factors, including Facebook’s decision to reduce the visibility of news, consumers’ waning enthusiasm for news or both, according to Nicholson. The findings align with other research that suggests consumer appetite for news has decreased, Newman said. “Facebook has found that news, in the era of polarization, is not serving the company mission of connecting people,” Newman said. “People are finding the news to be depressing, and Facebook is going to make decisions with that in mind.” Publishers’ Affiliate Revenues Are Flagging—These 4 Charts Show Why

Data

4 Charts Reveal How Facebook Traffic to Publishers Has Changed

The platform is a critical but declining source of referrals

Mark Stenberg

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Mark Stenberg