Facebook Causes Major Traffic Loss For Publishers With New Test, Downplays Damage

With its excess of 2 billion worldwide users, Facebook has become a major force in directing traffic to news publications. As such, anything that the social network does has the potential to disrupt the businesses of news portals. In a recent test, for example, Facebook tried to divide the posts from news sites in two categories that resulted in a steep drop in traffic.

Causing a drop between 60 to 80 percent of referral traffic to news sites in six countries, Facebook moved several Page posts to a section called Explore Feed from the more popular News Feed. As TechCrunch notes, Explore Feed is significantly harder to find than News Feed, which severely limited the number of people that these publications could reach.

In a blog post, head of Facebook News Feed Adam Mosseri writes that the test was intended to see if there was any kind of preference among users to put their contents in separate categories. Considering the results, this did not seem to be the case.

“The goal of this test is to understand if people prefer to have separate places for personal and public content. We will hear what people say about the experience to understand if it’s an idea worth pursuing any further. There is no current plan to roll this out beyond these test countries or to charge pages on Facebook to pay for all their distribution in News Feed or Explore. Unfortunately, some have mistakenly made that interpretation — but that was not our intention,” the post reads.

On the other hand, just because Facebook is no longer thinking of implementing this particular change, it doesn’t mean that similar changes won’t be tested out in the future. The social network has already started implementing other tests in certain regions, which executives have admitted could go on for months. Such a long period of reduced traffic could absolutely devastate news publications.