Locator: 45416TECH.
Folks visiting Facebook to get the news? That's like folks subscribing to Playboy for the stories.
The sites that could be in trouble? Google. Wikipedia.
The lede:
Facebook is shunning the news business in the US.
The Meta-owned company has quietly made changes in recent months that have dramatically reduced referral traffic to media outlets. The move has put considerable dents in the daily traffic publishers see, with the damage appearing to be more pronounced among those who publish more hard news-oriented content.
“If you’re a major publisher, you’ve gotten nicked,” an executive at a major media company, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to frankly assess the situation.
One publisher said they’ve witnessed a more than 30% drop in year-over-year referral traffic. Another said they’ve seen a roughly 40% drop. But both of those publishers produce a healthy volume of lifestyle content. Those who publish more hard news-focused content have seen far steeper drop-offs.
“Facebook nuked everyone’s traffic,” said a news-focused publisher, adding that the platform had since tweaked its all-mighty algorithm to provide a fix, but that the adjustment “hadn’t fixed” the problem much and that referral traffic was still far below what it was a year ago.
The issue is notable, given how much traffic the social media platform once sent to digital publishers. In the heyday of Facebook, news outlets were treated to a firehose of clicks, with articles regularly going viral on the platform.
The amount of traffic, however, has waned considerably in recent years, taking a toll on outlets that built business models reliant on the company. The recent changes reduce the already lackluster levels of referral traffic even more.
Now, if Facebook would just reduce the number of their annoying ads.
Next: sites like Google and Wiki will use AI to re-write their own stories and provide no links, if those links cost them money.
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