It’s Time For Media Websites To Look Beyond Facebook For Traffic, Says Report

Back in the day, Facebook was an important source of traffic for media websites — particularly for digitally native websites, that were not online extensions of the established mainstream or so-called ‘legacy’ media.

But the strategy of relying heavily on referral traffic from the social media behemoth, which continues to play around with its algorithms in a bid to maintain its behemoth status, has been costing such websites dearly over the past couple of years. In fact, many websites have been extensively using the platform for creating brand awareness.

Facebook’s latest algorithm changes that prioritise content posted by friends and family over the content shared by publishers and businesses have, according to this Forbes report, has worsened the already dramatic declines in the social media traffic to publishers. And digitally native websites fear an much worse in the near future.

This January, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, announced the overhauling of its way of ranking posts, which determines what is visible and what is not in users’ News Feeds.

The head of Facebook’s News Feed team wrote that “we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.” The idea is to give users a more “meaningful” engagement with the social network, says Facebook.

But while this newest algorithm change has sent media websites into a tizzy, the decline in social traffic through Facebook has been going on since early 2016, show studies by Parse.ly and SimilarWeb, as cited by the Forbes report.

Meanwhile, traffic to websites from Google increased in the same period. In fact, Google has been the main traffic source for websites before Facebook took over sometime in the middle of 2015, according to Parse.ly, but only for a period of two years.

Even wildly popular American media sites such as BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Mashable have suffered dramatic declines over the past two years.

Buzzfeed, for example, saw a decline in its desktop traffic coming from social media from 41% in January 2017 to around 25% in December 2017.

On the other, websites like the New York Times and Washington Post, which already have a well-established brand and an already humongous readership, draw an average of just about 10% of their traffic from social media sources, remaining invulnerable to the whims of Facebook.

Between the first quarter of 2016 to the end of 2017, each quarter has been showing consistently declining Facebook referral traffic to publishers. In fact, 90% of this decline occurred in 2017 following the US presidential elections.

It is worth remembering that Facebook drew heavy flak, in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as President, for letting fake news float around freely that was being propagated by publishers on the social media site. Last November, it also admitted to having 270 million fake or duplicate accounts.

But does this change in Facebook’s policy mean that digitally native websites previously relying on the social network are doomed? Of course not. The key is to diversify the sources of traffic and revenue, besides focussing on quality content and emphasising brand.

Buzzfeed is among those digitally native websites that have reduced their reliance on FB. While BuzzFeed being already a brand helps, its vice president of operations told Forbes that the company makes it a priority to try new platforms, such as Pinterest and Instagram, making the company less vulnerable to changes on any particular platform.

The publisher has for years prioritized being quick to try new platforms, according to Kempner, which helps make the company less vulnerable to changes on any single platform. Moreover, she says that BuzzFeed has been focussing on shareable content that has a lasting shelf-life, besides focussing on search engine optimization and even sending newsletters.

As SimilarWeb’s director of digital insights Gitit Greenberg tells Forbes, the best way is to diversify traffic sources so that changes on specific platforms and its algorithm don’t have an overwhelming impact. The article also gives the example of how websites put “themselves at risk when they invest too much in the whims of platforms, such as Facebook’s infamous “pivot to video” in 2015,” which got many websites in a flurry to produce FB feed-friendly video content. And now Facebook has decided there will be less video in news feed.

In short, its time for media websites to move beyond Facebook and start looking and investing elsewhere on Web 2.0, focussing on cultivating newer sources of traffic.