• Chart: Websites See Drastic Decline in Facebook Traffic

Authored by statista.com and submitted by jimrosenz
image for • Chart: Websites See Drastic Decline in Facebook Traffic

In the wake of the ongoing discussion about misinformation aka the spreading of “fake news” on social media and especially on Facebook, the company’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced significant changes to the way the news feed will work going forward. In an effort to re-focus on personal connections, Facebook users would find fewer news articles and less marketing content in their news feed and instead be shown more updates from their friends and families, Zuckerberg explained in a Facebook post in January.While the company’s stated goal of making sure that “time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent”, sounds promising to the platform’s users, Zuckerberg’s announcement left publishers and shareholders concerned. While the latter worried about how the changes applied to the news feed would affect advertising sales , publishers feared a negative impact on their own websites’ traffic. Over the past decade, Facebook has been a significant driver of traffic to news websites, even beating Google as the main source of referral traffic for many of them. And while many publishers haven’t been happy about the social network’s prominent role in content distribution, most of them have come to rely on it nonetheless. A stronger emphasis on personal content in the news feed will almost certainly have a negative effect on Facebook’s role as a traffic source, a role that has already started to diminish.According to a new report by Shareaholic , the percentage of website traffic coming from Facebook has already declined drastically in the second half of 2017. As you can see in the chart below, Facebook’s share of all visits to a sample of 250,000 websites has dropped from 30.9 percent in the second half of 2016 to 18.2 percent in the last six months of 2017. Shareaholic attributes the drop to a number of earlier changes that Facebook made to its news feed last year and to a general change in user behavior on the platform.

akanyan on February 23rd, 2018 at 13:43 UTC »

How many of those Pinterest visitors are from the bullshit they pull flooding Google images with their terrible hotlinks

TheMexicanJuan on February 23rd, 2018 at 13:00 UTC »

Facebook has been hostile to outside links and they are favouring internal links that lead to fb.com.

Post a video from youtube and you will have x10 less engagement than posting the same video hosted on Facbook.

wkfngrs on February 23rd, 2018 at 12:30 UTC »

Simply put, a year ago, I stopped seeing relevant stuff from family and friends. More or less I just saw shitty repost after shitty repost. Pure garbage run by repost account. Cough unilad and buzz feed, even though I didn't follow either of these pages that's all I saw. Now combine that with ads and voila. Same thing is happening with Instagram. We the community build an amazing platform with tons of content. Then the devs brought in advertising and repost accounts flood the algorithm. All I want to see is what my friends post and in an order of when they post it. Don't tell me what you think I want to see. Most social media sucks. Tumblr is the last place I get what I want. Instagram is almost in the early stages of cancer where as Facebook is terminally sick lying on its death bed.