Facebook referral traffic to publishers has 'plummeted'

Analytics data shows how Facebook referral traffic to publisher sites has fallen Press Gazette is reporting that Facebook referral traffic has ‘plummeted’ on the back of Meta’s continued turn away from the news industry. The scale of the fall is highlighted by data shared with the industry title by publisher analytics firm Chartbeat and digital intelligence platform Similarweb. 5-year drop The data shared by Chartbeat is drawn from 1,350 global publishers. It shows that in January 2018, of the page views coming from external, search and social, 27% or 2 billion page views came from Facebook. By April 2023, this had dropped to 11% or 1.5 billion. The analysis echoes a recent complaint from the UK’s biggest local and national news publisher Reach. Seeing a 14.5% digital revenue drop for the first four months of 2023 compared with the same period in 2022, Reach blamed a page-view slowdown on “recent changes to the way Facebook presents news content”. The closing of Buzzfeed News also spotlights the plight of publishing strategies that rely on social media referrals. In April 2020, desktop referrals to Buzzfeed from Facebook accounted for 76% of all its social referrals. Last month that had fallen to 34%. According to Similarweb, the number
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