Facebook to change news feed to focus on friends and family

For years, Facebook has courted publishers of all sizes, asking them to depend more and more on the social media giant to expand their audiences.

The side effect of those changes, the company said, is that content posted by publishers will show up less prominently in news feeds, resulting in significantly less traffic to the hundreds of news media sites that have come to rely on Facebook.

Facebook said it expects a drop in reach and referral traffic for publishers whose audience comes primarily to content posted by the publisher’s official Facebook page.

Over the last few years, publishers struggling to attract readers and draw online advertising dollars have come to view Facebook and its users as a good way to gain new audiences and revenue.

Publishers have little choice but to deal with the changes that Facebook makes, given the dependent relationship news media companies have with the social network.

[...] more than 40 percent of referral traffic to news sites comes from Facebook, according to data from Parsely, a digital publishing research firm.

Publishers value the referral traffic they get from Facebook, but they worry that readers will remain on the social media site for news content rather than visit the publishers’ own properties.

Zynga was also hurt by other shifts in computing, as users moved from desktop computers to mobile devices.

Last year, Facebook adjusted the news feed in response to users who were “worried about missing important updates from the friends they care about” — a change that some publishers believed resulted in decreased readership.