Facebook publisher referral traffic dropped significantly in 2017 (FB)

BI Intelligence

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The amount of external traffic Facebook sends to publishers has dropped significantly in 2017, while the amount of publisher traffic Google generates has increased substantially in the same timeframe, according to data from digital analytics company Parse.ly, per Recode.

Parse.ly’s data comes from 2,500 publishers — including Time Inc., The Wall Street Journal, and HuffPost — that use its analytics platform.

Facebook provided 26% of publishers’ external traffic in November of this year, down 13 percentage points from 39% in January. There are two key causes of this decline:

• Facebook changed its News Feed algorithm, suppressing visibility of some publishers’ content. Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm in June 2016 to favor user-generated content, like posts from friends and family, over posts from publishers. Additionally, the company began prioritizing fast-loading websites within News Feed in August of this year, causing slow-loading web pages to suffer from lower exposure and user engagement.
• The company was criticized heavily for hosting fake news, which may have discouraged users from consuming publisher content on the platform. It's clear that a large portion of consumers view Facebook as having a fake news problem — a poll commissioned by the Factual Democracy Project found that 78% of polled voters said they want Facebook to prevent inaccurate stories from being widely shared on its platform.

On the other hand, Google has become the dominant source of publishers traffic — it provided 44% of publishers’ traffic in November, up from 34% in January. Google has made changes to its news feed and search algorithm to encourage news consumption on the open web:

• Google rolled out a redesigned news feed for the Google app for Android and iOS in July. The feed displays previews of news stories from various publishers on top of a carousel of related articles. The update may have lured users who sought more diverse news coverage away from Facebook, which is often criticized as an "echo chamber" for surfacing stories and posts that users agree with.
• In September, Google ended its ‘First Click Free’ policy, driving more traffic to publishers with subscriptions. The policy penalized publishers that didn’t offer a certain number of articles for free beyond paywalls by ranking them lower in Google search results — Google’s algorithm only scanned for article content that wasn’t behind a paywall. Now, subscription-focused publishers are not penalized, which has helped drive more traffic to publishers.

Meanwhile, it doesn’t appear that a third player has emerged to steal a share of Facebook’s referral traffic to publishers. Twitter and Pinterest were ranked No. 3 and No. 4 sources of driving external traffic to publishers in 2017, though they each accounted for less than 3% of publishers’ traffic during the year. Moreover, the share of external traffic that Twitter and Pinterest — along with the remaining six sites of the top 10 external traffic referrers — drove to publishers remained relatively stable throughout 2017.

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