News traffic on Facebook continues to decline sharply

Facebook has quietly made changes in recent months that have significantly reduced referral traffic to newspapers. The move has had significant repercussions for news organizations in the United States and around the world .

Facebook is "squeezing" publishers' traffic. Photo: CNN

One news publisher reported a more than 30% year-over-year drop in referral traffic from Facebook. Another reported a drop of about 40%. Both publishers produce a healthy volume of lifestyle content.

“Facebook has cut traffic to newspapers,” said one news-focused publisher, adding that the platform has tweaked its algorithm to address the issue, but has “not fixed” many of the issues and referral traffic remains much lower than it was a year ago.

In Facebook’s heyday, articles were shared widely on the platform. However, traffic has dropped significantly in recent years, hurting newspapers whose businesses depend on the platform. Recent changes have caused traffic to drop again.

This came as lawmakers around the world called for big tech companies like Meta to pay publishers for content posted on their platforms. Facebook responded by asserting that news organizations needed it more than it needed journalism, and threatened to pull news from its entire platform.

“News is not a significant part of Facebook globally,” the company said in a March post, adding that “less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook Feeds are posts with links to news articles.”

Hoang Ton (according to CNN)

Source: https://www.congluan.vn/luu-luong-tin-tuc-bao-chi-tren-facebook-tiep-tuc-giam-manh-post261121.html