Facebook Referral Traffic to News Sites Drops by 50%

The social media platform Facebook announced a significant reduction in referral traffic from its platform to external news sites, reaching 50% over the past year. According to reports from Chartbeat and Similarweb, which relied on analyzing visitor traffic to about 800 news sites using external tracking data to estimate the volume of referral traffic from Facebook, data collected since 2018 revealed that referral traffic to external news sites from Facebook had declined by 58% over the past six years and by 50% over the past year. The data also indicates that Facebook now accounts for only 7% of the total referral traffic to those sites in the report. In 2018, referral traffic from the popular social network accounted for about 30% of total visits. Small websites were greatly affected by the changes made by the platform. Meta, the parent company, gradually reduced the presence of news content in its apps and discontinued the Facebook Journalism Project (FJP) in Dec. 2023, which supported news publishers. M eta changed its content filtering and display algorithms on its platforms based on artificial intelligence to reduce the appearance of external links in general, while enhancing the visibility of videos, images, and other posts to keep users on the platform for longer periods, focusing on entertainment and ignoring the controversy and sharp political debate associated with political content. Meta aims to increase user engagement on the platform by distancing itself from political issues and regulatory scrutiny, following the same policy on Instagram and Threads. Source: Qatar News Agency