Website Owners Say Traffic Is Plummeting After a Facebook Algorithm Change

An apparent change to Facebook’s algorithm in May caused a dramatic drop in traffic to news and media websites, according to a growing list of publishers and data from Echobox, a social media management company.Meta’s Apparent Firing GoofIt’s a troubling change in an increasingly frail digital news business, where companies have little choice but to rely on social media’s biggest gatekeeper. Publishers say they deserve transparency, but as with similar changes in the past, there’s been no communication from Meta, Facebook’s parent company. In fact, Meta did not respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment on the matter.Sources who spoke to Gizmodo all say the shift started in February and worsened in the months following. “There’s been a significant downward trend, and it’s an important platform for us because our audience is disproportionately on Facebook. It makes up about 25% of our traffic,” said Robert Chappell, Executive Editor at Madison 365, a nonprofit newsroom that covers communities of color in Wisconsin. “You never know what’s going to change. It makes it hard to plan for the future.”Clicks coming from Facebook have been in decline for about a year, but that drop accelerated rapidly in May 2023, according to Echobox, which collects
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